1 In 1930, in September, on a boat trip to Cairo, I fell into the Mediterranean Sea; I fell with a mighty splash, since at the time the sea was smooth, unruffled by any wave. Nevertheless, my fall was noticed only a minute later, after the ship had already sailed a kilometer and a half on-and when it was finally turned around and sent back in my direction, the agitated captain gave it too much speed and the immense vessel's momentum carried it past the place where I was choking on...

In the noble city of Burgfarrubach, a small, malicious spirit had been playing a curious prank for quite some time. Whenever a priest was called in to expel him from the house he was turning topsy-turvy, he would dupe the exorcist by fleeing the premises before his exorcism was complete. And no sooner was he in a new location when another priest would arrive with benedictions, maledictions, and conjurations, then—poof!—he played the same trick. So it was that no one had ever...

Whenever I sit at a bar drinking like this, I always think what a sacred profession bartending is. The bartender, with the stained-glass shelves of many-colored bottles behind him, moves precisely about in a shining crystal vestibule, like a priest conducting a ritual. Pouring the holy liquid into a glass, he listens with a reverent, sympathetic smile as the customers recite their woes. At the far end of the bar is a pair of unattractive Mesdames with coarse skin and too much makeup....

Grandfather was very strong. When he was working in the kitchen garden or whittling spade handles (for relaxation, he would always whittle handles-there were enough of them piled in a corner of the barn to last us for decades), dressed in his faded shirt with the sleeves rolled up high, Anton would say to himself something like "The rounded bulges of his muscles rolled up and down his arm under the skin" (Anton was fond of expressing things in bookish style). But even now, when Grandfather...

I live humbly near the canyon's mouth where stately trees ring village ruins. When you came on twisted rocky paths, who welcomed you at my mountain gate? Fishing boats frozen into icy shallows, hunting fires out across cold headlands, and in all this quiet beyond white clouds, wild gibbons heard among distant bells.   From Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China, forthcoming from New Directions.

Two brothers, the first two brothers. Conceived on the threshold of paradise, so to speak, when Adam and Eve, driven out by the cherubim with the flaming sword that turned every way, took up residence in this our world. Such an origin undoubtedly represents a great mark of distinction compared to subsequent generations. Nevertheless, it carries a side effect, a certain inexperience, a naïve ignorance of what would later become the most common human sentiments. Thus Eve coupled with...

Snoopy Goes to Kasimov I used to torture myself over the question, I was baffled by it: to what could I attribute the incontrovertible fact of my total lack of literary talent? A fluke of nature? Blind chance? Genetic aberration? And this in a family tree, mind you, that's produced five writers minimum, two of which, in the opinion of their contemporaries, made a sizable contribution to the treasurehouse of Russian belles-lettres. My grandfather, who during his lifetime was honored...

In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway says: "The only place where you could see life and death, i.e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death." R. hadn't yet read Hemingway's book that exhausting afternoon when she'd lost her way and ended up at...

A spring breeze ruffled my hair; at the foot of the hills a thaw had set in. It is usually cold when the snow melts, but today the long-hidden sun finally made an appearance. I put on a coat and started down the hill, bathed in sunlight. Few people used that quiet path, though we were not far from the city and the hill was not high. People here kept to themselves; aside from a trip down for their shopping in the mornings, they had little contact with the outside world. I found life up...

When the Olmedo family arrived at their new home a strong easterly wind, the Levanter, was blowing. It blew the house's canvas awnings so high it appeared they would come free of their aluminum frames, then let them drop for a moment before inflating them again, producing a monotonous sound, muffled and heavy, like the beating wings of a flock of monstrously large birds. A rhythmic sound, metallic, much sharper, conveying the roughness of rust, could be heard now and again when the wind...

A cloud is her dress       a flower her face             Spring wind through the threshold       stirs       deep peony-dew If unable to meet                       on a jade mountain peak we'll face at Jasper Terrace                 beneath the moon   "Nine Poems from...

A company of moles following one leader roamed everywhere over the ruins that night. In that deeply silent time before the moon had risen, only the sound of their small rustlings mingled with the wind. The black mole in the lead was unconcerned about the dust that sullied his fine satin coat as he pulled away a smoke-blackened tile shard. He had a vague recollection that this had once been the stovepit of a fat woman. . . . Hidden amid the weeds and grass were many cracks and fissures....

These stories are taken from a work-in-progress entitled Heart's Reason: Stories of Affection from the Liaozhai Zhiyi, edited and translated by Susan Wan Dolling. Liaozhai Zhiyi--literally, "Strange (Historical) Stories from a Studio for Leisurely Conversations"--is a posthumous collection of five hundred-odd entries that the author Pu Song-ling made into little books called juan and circulated among his scholar friends during the last thirty or so years of his relatively long life...

1 There's an expression that describes me: timid as a mouse. That's what my teacher said, back when I was in primary school. It was one autumn, I remember, in Chinese class. Our teacher stood on the rostrum, wearing a dark blue cotton jacket over a clean white shirt. I was sitting in the middle of the front row, looking up at him. He held a textbook in his hand, and his fingers were coated with red, white, and yellow chalk dust. As he read the text aloud, his face and his hands and...

My father used to be a surgeon. He was strong and healthy, and talked in a resonant voice. He would often stand at the operating table for ten hours at a time, but at the end of his shift his face would not show the slightest signs of fatigue, and as he walked back to our apartment his steps were loud and firm. Nearing home, he would often take a pee by the corner of the wall. His urine would splash noisily on the wall, like a sudden downpour of rain. When my father was twenty-five years...

1 The surviving alumni of Huaguang College might remember an event that happened on April 3, 1937. It was the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the college, and the celebration went on from early morning till late night, events including a tea party, a cocktail party, the unveiling of the bronze bust of the founder of the college, commemoratory speeches, and a performance of Much Ado About Nothing by the students' amateur dramatic troupe. It was a glorious page in the history of...

After the afternoon in N., something changed. I became cold-blooded and more demanding at the same time; Michael was surprised at me and sometimes didn't know what to do. He hadn't realized, he said one evening, what a wild temperament was hidden inside me, what a volcano. I made wild little celebrations out of our meetings; I waited for him naked in a hotel room; I bought champagne, appeared in a semitransparent robe or wore nothing under my coat as I waited for him at Reception;...

In the Mercantour National Park in the French Alps, feral wolves, recently reintroduced after centuries of extinction, have begun attacking sheep in their pens-not for food, it seems, but for sport. It's a big news story that fascinates Commissaire principal Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg in Paris, despite his having quite other fish to fry. Meanwhile, in the mountain village of Saint-Victor-du-Mont, his ex-girlfriend, the composer-cum-plumber Camille Forestier, supports her current partner,...

Bewitched by Shanghai is narrated by an adolescent, Danny, who lives in postwar Barcelona with his widowed mother. Between school and starting working as an apprentice in a jeweler's workshop, she has arranged for him to accompany Captain Blay in his daily wanderings round the city to make sure he comes to no harm. Captain Blay was wounded in the Civil War and lost his two sons in the fighting. Now he is obsessed with collecting signatures for a petititon to protest about a gas leak...

It had been a good year for olives, too, that year. The farm trees, loaded with buds the year before, had all produced ripe fruit, despite the fog that had threatened their blossoms. Zirafa, who had a good number of them on his farm Le Quote at Primosole, foreseeing that the five old glazed ceramic jars stored in his cellar wouldn't be enough to hold all the olive oil from the new harvest, had already ordered a sixth bigger one from Santo Stefano di Camastra, where they made them;...