Thisbe Nissen has a wonderful new story in the Winter 2008/Issue 65 Glimmer Train. Her character descriptions in The Good People of New York were so good (funny and painful at the same time), I tried to emulate them for months afterwards. Her short story collection Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night was one of my picks for short story month. I've always dug her style - quirky but raw, almost silly but then not. She manages, always, to create characters that feel so real to me, so authentic that I'm pretty sure some of them live in my building. Her short story, "And the Night Goes Off Like a Gun in a Car", is equally yummy:
"My mother is--was--pseudonymously--Scarlett Beech, author of sixty-seven novels of wanton lust and ribald copulation. During her ten-year decline, she's stopped writing stories and tells them instead, from an ever-weirdening Alzheimer's-addled fishbowl. Which might be amusing if she didn't always manage to push buttons in such a way that her tales hit--freakishly, disturbingly--a pulse point of arousal, like the accidental brush of cloth against a nipple at just the time of month when that's all it takes to send a quiver through your pelvis, fallopian tubes fluttering like waking eyelids."
Good, no? And this:
"When my father died this spring I wanted to find a home for Mom near me, in California, but she refused to so much as discuss it. She said, 'I will slit my wrists, Millicent.' This was maybe six weeks ago. She wanted to stay in the apartment, on the Upper West Side, where I grew up, in Manhattan, where she'd lived her entire life. Slit her wrists? How was I meant to take that?"
Go on. Pick up the latest copy of Glimmer Train today. Better yet, subscribe. This issue is packed with goodness, including a story by Garth Risk Hallberg of The Millions which is...very good.
