On the first attempt, the trigger jammed. The prisoner wasn’t afraid, and in fact felt a sort of indifference that seemed, in light of the brutality of the instant, to have been there all along, his whole life, quietly lurking behind each of his experiences as though awaiting the ideal moment to surface. Behind him, the footsteps of the soldier, his executioner, rang out: rapid-fire, ready to finish off the job. Then the cold of the steel touched the back of his head for the second...

At first she stared at the window for a while, as her life paraded past in scenes: her mother’s house in Piura, the silent sun high over Piura’s dusty rooftops, which bristled with aluminum antennas marking the luminously streaked sky. Her mother’s house that smelled of Bolívar soap and rue plants beneath the gold sun that hung in the taut, infinite sky. She missed it all, but she was in Paris and there was nothing she could do about it. That was the harsh truth....

The recording and transcript below make up one example of the oral storytelling traditions of Peru, this one from the Tikuna, the most numerous tribe in the Amazon. The recording is made in the Tikuna language. José Fernando Muratú, narrator. 1Nguxtapax went out hunting; it was his second time going out hunting. When he came back from the hunt the kids were bathing in the ravine. 2“Nguxtapax tütütü ãῧbrikari tütütü,...

So it all boils down to this. A whole morning seeing my face and Paulo’s on the television screen. Ten reporters camped out at the entrance to the building. Three policemen on phone-tap duty, reading the soccer pages in the dining room. They might get in touch at any moment. Waiting is all that’s left for me. I’ve called Lucía to tell her that, obviously, I won’t be doing the program today. She started to cry. This can’t be happening to you, she...

Frail before the squalor             squalor being a feeble answer the everyday self gives its own abjections it surprises me to be in a city whose name like the humidity that clings to its ancient walls or like its tubercular pigeons means nothing to me any more than being inside its plastic image as I sink into La Defense or lose myself in the ardor of its past      oh the purity the freshness of withered things...

Audio courtesy of Literatura Sonora. We look like funerary bundles dug out of our graves. There are ten or twelve people sitting on the room’s floor, in a circle, and in the dark. The healer is at the center. He is smoking a mapacho—tobacco typically found in the forests of Peru—and exhales the smoke above the rim of a bottle filled with a viscous liquid. He takes a sip, and then calls us one by one. I’m afraid. Those who have taken ayahuasca before say the...

I grew up in a country at war. I still remember clearly a month in 1990 in which twelve bombs exploded near my house in Lima, one every two or three days. Peru was living through its worst years of violence, and the Shining Path—the dangerous terrorist group that controlled a large part of the Andean region—had succeeded in descending from the mountains to the coast, and was very close to dealing the final blow. Lima, at the edge of the sea, was preparing for a siege by the...

Downstairs my dad’s real upset and he says when he gets his hands on those people he’s going to beat the crap out of them. My mom and María Fe are crying and going on about how could something like this have happened. Apparently someone’s stolen Dieguito’s body, his grave has been desiccated or something like that. I’m not allowed to go downstairs myself because they say I’m too small, but I know loads of things and I’m sure they’re...

In this short story by Tibetan author Pema Bhum, set at the time of Mao Tse-tung’s death, a man’s family  is redeemed by the chance actions of his ailing infant son.   It seemed that even the birds nestling atop the rafters of Tenpa’s house were tiring of the rain. They sat perched in a line along a wooden beam and watched the rain drizzling down. Cocking their heads this way and that, the birds crooned softly. A steady drip of water fell gently and steadily...

The singer’s name was Yangchen Pema and before she died, there were many stories told about her. People said she had an abortion at some hospital, that the child’s father was some big shot county chief who bought her an apartment to make up for it, and that his family’s tantric master, a black magician, had blown puffs of air into her mouth that sweetened and strengthened her voice, not to mention that while stealing another singer’s lover, she had also stolen...

I am Gendhis, the hooker who spat in Pak Lurah’s face last night. Who says I’m afraid of Pak Lurah? I was never afraid of him, not before he went on the haj pilgrimage and not after he came back. I’m not afraid of position or rank because I don’t see any of that. I also don’t see Pak Lurah’s face. Two months ago, Pak Lurah, the village head, said that after he came back from the haj pilgrimage he wouldn’t touch me again. Upon returning from the...

August 27, 2014 Lucky Punch My second novel Deutscher Meister is about how the professional boxer Heinrich Trollmann beat the Nazis; it was published by Hoffmann und Campe in 2014. As I was writing the last chapter, researching liver punches, those ending in K.O. and those not, and how differently and yet specifically to the liver punch the recipients fall, and what kind of pain they feel, and how liver punches take effect on the inside, in anatomical terms, I worked out where a...

1 After half a life: selva oscura. The dog that I was. Jesus-mittens nailed onto treetips—the Lord had large hands. Blooms made of ejaculate. I walked on. Deeper into the woods.   2 King of the beasts: a bird walking with a broken nose; wings, a comet tail, never worn. Pride after the fall. Carnal desire: a puffy octopus from the class of unsuitable cephalopods, floating in the sky in place of a moon. Staring at the transwoman I cannot be. Call me Beatrice, she says. I...

May 6, 1946, thirty miles east of Dayton, Ohio, at an altitude of six thousand feet, in an old C-54 transport plane. John Conkey, six feet four inches and still completely pale after the fudged takeoff, unbuckles himself and wriggles forward through the gutted interior of the aircraft to Ray Melanchthon Petersime, who is sitting in one of the two remaining rows of seats and watching as a backwater called South Solon emerges beneath him, a heap of houses dumped between sodden fields by the...

The barrel of a gun is trained on my head. I stare at the wall, the unplastered bricks that have to be scenery so that this doesn’t stop being a game. Faruq is lying behind me. I want to turn my head, expecting the shot, blanks, a bang as my eardrum ruptures. The soldiers yelling, the supervisor’s voice, and I feel like I can hear Faruq gasping. Don’t move!—it’s my own breathing. The moment we were supposed to prepare for. The instant when the situation starts...

He doesn’t say that he had no choice. He says that his father was also a soldier. He says that if he had the choice today, he would perhaps choose differently. At that time he made his choice. My two grandfathers were also soldiers and fought for the lunatic who had his grandparents gassed in a concentration camp. But he has never asked about my grandfathers. He was stationed for five years in the occupied territories. Voluntarily. During the First Intifada. He tells this to...

History will remember this man Our grandchildren will study him between school recesses Old women will speak of him as a strange enigma A myth, an eccentric aberration . . . The old men will brush off their shoulders Their lesson finished, the children will rush to the courtyard to play ubete, the wolf And mothers let out a weak sigh At hearing their children cry: Peter ninde? Ni wewe, ni wewe Who’s Pierre? It’s you, it’s you. There will be no more wolf on the vast...

In the 1950s, the behavioral scientist Desmond Morris carried out art experiments with the chimpanzee Congo. What began with a hesitant pencil line drawn by Congo soon led to expressive, powerful, abstract compositions. Julian Huxley and Pablo Picasso were among those who bought the work. Congo painted with a passion but he wasn’t interested in "impact." He felt no need to display his pictures. In fact, he liked to tear them up as soon as they were finished. Morris had to go to some...

The hand of the pocket watch winds on with a sound like mocking laughter—continuously pricking his anxiety, preventing him from forgetting how the nightmare started. He remembers. This is how it began: That day of the winter holiday happened to be Aso’s birthday. The bus passed through the deep gloom of the bamboo forest, delivering him, in a daze, to the spa town. The lattice of bamboo shadows fell upon him like a glitter of whirling blades, dicing his body to bits. He did, in...

The Year of Pearls tells the story of Lucie, a married woman in her late thirties whose life is thrown into disarray when she embarks on a heady, yearlong love affair with a younger woman. In this extract the narrator, still living with her husband, finally confronts the long-suppressed nature of her sexuality.  She made up her mind. There had to be some clues, signs, or leads somewhere around here. Some portents of things to come, some verifiable cracks appearing in the ground before...