Solos By Genre | Ploughshares

"All week Max thinks about it. At night he falls asleep constructing the narrative and at work he spends the lunch hour in his car manufacturing details. When Sunday night rolls around and Nora has been put to bed and Julia is asleep or reading, he brings the radio station’s stream up on his computer. He’s in the den and the moon illuminates the snow falling outside.

"Of course, they choose the Fourth of July to reenact their childhood, a holiday known for explosions, maimed limbs, trumped-up loyalty. The kids—Abby will never stop calling them that—have grown unduly nostalgic in the past year, mythologizing her mediocre dinners, romanticizing their sporadic vacations, basically whitewashing decades of benign neglect into a family life that neither she nor Hank recognizes."

"There is a distinctive cool cinderblock smell to math departments everywhere. Conference posters fluttering on the office doors, the glossy canary-yellow spines of Springer textbooks. A red-bearded man in black socks and sandals walks amiably down the hall carrying a cup of coffee and a pad of paper, a one-armed wristwatch pinned to his breast pocket.

"Claire remembered sitting between her mother's knees on a green plastic stool and crying this way: breathy and brutal and practically wild. Her mother refused to relax her hair but she also refused to learn to comb through it without causing Claire intense pain, the breakage of of Claire's hair, and the snap of some combs. That all changed when Claire discovered braids, and that she could have this pain only five times a year.

"When my parents died, I inherited all of their photographs and papers as they had inherited their parents’ photographs and papers and so on back a few generations. . . . When an historian looks through archives, it’s often for clues to the things that are not there: lovers, important friendships, deleted sentences, political alliances, and shameful secrets. If the secrets are shameful enough, there’s been an attempt to hide them, but there are always clues.

"At first, the Pekingese lived in the same building as me—actually, he was in the apartment right across the hall. I’d often encounter him sitting outside the door when I left for work in the morning or the afternoon, or when I was coming home at lunchtime and in the evening. Tiny, feeble, matted hair, an exhausted expression—he was a pitiful sight to behold. Such a well-behaved dog, too."

"Somehow, I understood, even as a kid, that I’d never learn the truth about my father directly, a man who hid the truth from himself so thoroughly, the hinges of his mind almost always welded shut but, lubricated by drink, sometimes swinging open as he exposed, then tried to protect himself from, his wounds like a cornered porcupine, its back to me, hissing, its needles extended, erect and ready to let fly."

After college professor Cass receives an intriguing student response to an art assignment about human connection, she considers the hidden selfish desires behind acts of kindness toward strangers. When she shows the submission to her brother, Glen, the pair reflect on their own dysfunctional family and unfulfilled personal lives.

On September 7, 1978, Bulgarian writer and journalist Georgi Markov was assassinated by the Bulgarian government. Since moving to London in 1970 and working as a newscaster for the BBC’s Foreign Service, he had become one of the most vocal critics of the regime, broadcasting narrative essays about life in Bulgaria.

As he awaits the results of his HIV test, Eduardo recalls the summer of his thirteenth year, when he learned about the crimes of his father, a Nazi officer at Dachau. Struggling with this knowledge, young Eduardo takes solace in visiting the lake where his father died, but his guilt is complicated by the knowledge that as a gay man, in a different time, he too might have been a victim of his father’s.