the notes

There is a woman whose daughter is in possession of the most wonderful pair of tits known to man. We cannot look at it from the father’s perspective, for he is dead, and if he were not, he would have killed the daughter before her yielding and miraculous globes could ripen. The dowdiest sweaters the mother buys do nothing to dampen their bounty. Boys line up on the sidewalk at dawn for a view of them wrapped in a blue shower towel. Truthfully the mother is as proud of the tits as if she had sculpted them from living clay. At times they exude the gravity of small planets; at others they are playful and high-spirited, coquettish, droll.

Some Improvements to the Redwood Forest

It is with considerable ambivalence that we hereby announce the reopening of Muir Woods National Monument to the public this coming spring. Once again, this marvelous, ancient range of coastal redwoods and giant sequoias will welcome arboreal enthusiasts from around the globe. However, these visitors will now enjoy significant enhancements to the area, developed specifically according to the suggestions of previous guests.

The most immediate of these costly renovations is a second, larger gift shop situated just beyond the perimeter of the site. Tourists in a hurry or disinclined to part with seven dollars on the matter of admission can now enjoy the convenience of purchasing a souvenir on the very edge of our parking lot. It may go without saying that this new facility is sure to alleviate some of the congestion within the inner, original gift shop.

Despite the strident legal efforts of the Bureau for the Protection of Conspicuous Consumption, we have been granted the right to disable all mobile devices upon park entry with a harmless electromagnetic pulse. This is not an attempt to preserve an atmosphere of tech-less tranquillity, for the record: If you cannot resist the urge to “selfie,” use one of our designated tinted kiosks, where mirrors, lip gloss, and blowouts are provided for an additional fee.

It was probably around the time I reclaimed my neighbor’s trash as room décor that I started following Miles Klee’s blog “Hate The Future.” I was jealous. Still am. No one, including myself, would have blamed Klee if he had done what so many people get to do, and turned his blog into a book. Instead, in 2012, he published the novel Ivyland. A 2013 Tournament of Books selection, it depicted a slight future, or perhaps an alternate present of the eponymous and fantastical New Jersey suburb. His newest book True False visits similar dystopian territory, but is much more than that. The collection is not about a place or time, but the uncomfortable dichotomy of fact and fiction, intimacy and enmity, real and fake, true and false.

In a universe of overused adjectives, there’s one you rarely hear: 'spellbinding.' Perhaps that’s because very little holds our rapt attention as if by some cold magic. The best Steven Millhauser stories, as fans of his many collections know, do exactly this. They cast a spell from which there is no release. But the sorcery chooses certain victims. I was thrown when my brother confessed he found 2008’s Dangerous Laughter a puzzling antique, its narratives at once too fanciful and inscrutable. An explanation for this divisive quality derives from a fellow fan, who suggested to me that Millhauser writes about being overly sensitive to the world. I couldn’t agree with her more, especially as his latest collection, Voices in the Night, reinforces her theory. 'The Wife and the Thief' unfurls with a slow Gothic dread worthy of Edgar Allan Poe himself, generated by nothing more strange than suburban paranoia: a woman finds herself sleepless next to her peacefully slumbering husband in bed and imagining (or not imagining) a cat burglar prowling about their home. But which condition does she really desire – being correct and therefore threatened, or delusional and therefore mad? The chill of the story is how she tries to reconcile both outcomes into a single, ungraspable reality.

The apartment listing, spare and direct, stood apart from the exclamation points that forested her vision. She knew not to say to the broker that she was new to the city, no matter how the facets of the woman’s necklace shone and tempted. One bedroom, terrible kitchen, renovated bath and sunken living, gorgeous compromise all in all. Here's climate control, the broker said, and here’s a walk-in closet. There’s your fire escape. That’s a man.

Follow the finger and yes: a man, beardedly complacent, reading a slim tatty novel in bed. She laughed; he winked. She remembered her guide was a tenant, not broker, and ditching the lease in its final months—the man incidental, a decoration. He may as well have been a cat. She signed the densely printed forms in an office that afternoon, having nearly read them but losing to boredom and deeming the rent the lone detail worth checking.

On the first of the month, four likewise balding men, arguing in Arabic and laughing, carried boxes and furniture out of storage across the river. A graffitied truck rumbled to her new address, where they admired the handsome building before starting to ferry stuff inside. She stayed on the sidewalk, returning emails, micro-duty of the job she’d vowed to ignore for the morning, having taken a personal day. The balding brothers came back downstairs, laughing harder than ever.

Your husband, one said when she gave a questioning look.

A very humorous man, said another.

She trooped upstairs and pushed the front door more ajar and saw him, his beard a bit fuller and redder. Shirtless, lying flat on her couch, eating a quart of mint ice cream with a rubber spatula. It wasn’t going well. His chest was the stickiest thing she’d seen.

What are you doing, she yelled.

What? he said. I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious.