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The Battler by Hemingway

  The Battler by Ernest Hemingway BIOGRAPHY Nick stood up. He was all right. He looked up the track at the lights of the caboose going out of sight around a curve. There was water on both sides of the track, then tamarack swamp. He felt of his knee. The pants were torn and the skin was barked. His hands were scraped and there were sand and cinders driven up under his nails. He went over to the edge of the track, down the little slope to the water and washed his hands. He washed them carefully in the cold water, getting the dirt out from the nails. He squatted down and bathed his knee. That lousy crut of a brakeman....

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Scott Fitzgerald / Boil Some Water-Lots of It

  "BOIL SOME WATER-LOTS OF IT" by F. Scott Fitzgerald Scott Fitzgerald / Pongan agua a hervir, mucha, mucha   Pat Hobby sat in his office in the writers' building and looked at his morning's work, just come back from the script department. He was on a "polish job," about the only kind he ever got nowadays. He was to repair a messy sequence in a hurry, but the word "hurry" neither frightened nor inspired him for Pat had been in Hollywood since he was thirty--now he was forty-nine. All the work he had done this morning (except a little changing around of lines so he could claim them as his own)--all he had actually invented was a single imperative...

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Jane Alison / But I’ve Got Ovid

Illustration by Marc Aspinal But I’ve Got Ovid A Duck, Miami, and the Fantasy Life By Jane Alison After thirty years of disaster with men and fresh from a spanking-new heartbreak, I’m back in Miami, back in my dilapidated condo in paradise, to decide if it’s time to retire from love. Even my mother thinks I should. When I called to tell her of the latest disaster, she sighed and said, Maybe, darling, you should give up on all that. Maybe it’s just time. Okay, I’ve got other loves, after all. My broken-down mother. My blind old cat. A love poet who’s been dead two thousand years whose words I’m being paid to translate. A friend or two via text. Who needs more? Every morning...

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