Last Bender

3. The door dinged and swung open decisively as Athol, the UPS guy, bumped his hand truck down the stairs. He was a ruddy, aggressively ugly man in that particularly English way that is almost beautiful, like a gnarl on an oak tree, with his bent nose, pockmarked skin, and blue, rhinoceros eyes. “Back here,” [...]

Endangered Species 2.3 That night I believe I stood at her door for five minutes listening to the pounding bass, feeling tweeters ripple through the cinder block and wood. After this momentary hiatus from reality, I turned tail and pushed the elevator button. I had not been detected. There would be no loss of face. [...]

2.2 All through junior high Tammy Markham ran and swam and played tennis. Her athletic body was unbearable. I would see her at the pool in her bikini. She had the hairiest armpits of all the girls and used to lie out on her towel on the deck so that you saw her pubic hair [...]

2.1      Sally’s book wouldn’t be difficult to find, I thought, as I unpacked boxes of The Early English Text Society and The Early Scottish Text Society volumes. There were complete runs of each. They had a good clean smell. No mold or mildew. The leather bindings were still supple and the repaired bindings were [...]

2. Roy and Sally’s sister, Lydia, were best friends, and it was Lydia who had the apartment first. They had become friends years earlier. I remember the night. I was lying on the bottom bunk watching The Crawling Eye on channel 9. I was neither awake nor asleep. The eyes attacked Forrest Tucker in the [...]

2. Roy and Sally’s sister, Lydia, were best friends, and it was Lydia who had the apartment first. They had become friends years earlier. I remember the night. I was lying on the bottom bunk watching The Crawling Eye on channel 9. I was neither awake nor asleep. The eyes attacked Forrest Tucker in the [...]

ENDANGERED SPECIES By Jon Frankel   What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking, There is no end of things in the heart. -Ezra Pound Exile’s Letter 1. Were it not for Dr. Porlach, I would not have answered the call. He was trying to sell me some books (as [...]

This is an excerpt from the beginning of Endangered Species. It begins with the sentence Eric maroney thought should be the first sentence of the book. I tried to make it that, I really did, but I couldn’t make the book work that way. It couldn’t start with Roy or Sally. It had to start [...]

This is an excerpt from the middle of Endangered Species. I’m going to post the whole thing one of these days but for now it’s going to be excerpts, and an excerpted novel isn’t always all that comprehensible. In this part my characters are putting on a show, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. It’s a sort [...]

Jail’s a good place for reading books. And a ship at sea. Men on submarines read a lot, and in the Antarctic. But the place I’ve read the most has been in decompression chambers, after working in a diving bell. You’re breathing helium. And there’s just nothing else you can do for weeks at a [...]