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By Marisa Silver

They were going to boil Dorothy’s blood. Take it out, heat it, put it back in. The cancer would be gone. Well, that wasn’t exactly it. The treatment had a more formal-sounding name, thermosomethingorother, a word that was both trustworthy (because you recognized the prefix) and lofty, so that you didn’t really question it, knew you were too thick to really understand whatever explanation might be given you. “They’re going to boil my blood” is what it came down to, and this was what Dorothy had told her daughter, Helen, when she called her from New York. There were statistics, affidavits. There was a four-color brochure from the clinic in Frankfurt, Germany, printed in three languages. As they waited for the train in the Munich station, Helen studied the pamphlet’s fonts and graphics. A frequent dupe of advertising herself–how many depilatories and night creams had she bought over the years, and at what expense?–Helen understood the significance behind the choice of peaceful, healing blue over charged, emotional red, the softening elegance of the italicized quotes from Adèle de Chavigny, a woman from Strasbourg who had not only survived having her blood boiled but had gone on to live a life of graceful transcendence. There were no concrete images of the clinic itself, no pictures of whatever this boiling machine might look like. Helen imagined huge vats like those in a brewery–wide, clear tubes with viscous, viral blood moving sluggishly in one direction, while bright, animated, healthy blood rushed eagerly back toward the patient. On the roof of the brewery, she imagined enormous chimneys expelling the sweet-sour-smelling residue of defeated disease into the air. Poof, poof, the smokestacks would go, and all the German townsfolk (yes, in her fantasy they were wearing lederhosen and small peaked caps) would look up, proud to know that, in their town, death had been conquered.

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By Helen Simpson

“Gardening!” the girl said, and tilted back in her chair the way she knew would get a reaction. “It’s like knitting, isn’t it.”

“Stop that, Lara,” her mother said. “You’ll break the chair.”

“A sign of middle age,” Lara continued. “Old age. It’s what old people do when there’s nothing left in their lives.”

“I thought you were supposed to be learning about Henry VIII,” said her mother, Susan, glaring at her over a recently acquired pair of Ready Readers.

“Look at him, snipping away,” Lara said, and pointed to her father up the garden with his secateurs. “You’re just control freaks, you two. You should let it run wild!”

“Right,” Susan grunted, returning to her list.

“You could have a meadow out there,” Lara said. “Go green. A jungle!”

“It might just as well be,” Susan said. “Great fat lumps of squirrels crashing round the trees like monkeys. Come on, Lara, what about some revision.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” Lara shrieked.

“Perish the thought,” Susan said. “But if you’re going to take over the kitchen table like this when you’ve got a perfectly good desk in your bedroom–”

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An old master gives us an exemplary what-not-to-do list in her new book

Alice Munro spins tales that show us, again and again, and with wondrous grace, how much can be done in a simple short story. Yet the 74-year-old Canadian does it by breaking every rule ever taught in a writing seminar, setting up a master class along the sidelines. Her latest–her 11th–collection of stories, The View from Castle Rock (Knopf; 349 pages), marks a departure from her usual examinations of women in rural Canada leaving home to remake their possibilities by drawing instead on family documents, historical records (from 19th century Scotland) and what feels like memoir to piece together, in 12 parts, a fictionalized chronicle of how her tough-minded clan got from the Ettrick Valley near Edinburgh to America. Yet it shows, as usual, how to draw gasps from other writers by defying the laws of gravitas as effortlessly as Michael Jordan defied those of gravity.

Pocket the $30,000 you would otherwise spend on an M.F.A. writing degree, and just consider her example(s):

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Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no-nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke. Married for two decades of precious, precious life, she and Rafe seemed currently to be partners only in anger and dislike, their old, lusty love mutated to rage. It was both their shame and demise that hate (like love) could not live on air. And so in this, their newly successful project together, they were complicitous and synergistic. They were nurturing, homeopathic, and enabling. They spawned and raised their hate together, cardiovascularly, spiritually, organically. In tandem, as a system, as a dance team of bad feeling, they had shoved their hate center stage and shone a spotlight down for it to seize. Do your stuff, baby! Who is the best? Who’ s the man?

“Pro-nuke? You are? Really?” Kit was asked by her friends, to whom she continued, indiscreetly, to complain.

“Well, no.” Kit sighed. “But in a way.”

“Seems like you need someone to talk to.”

Which hurt Kit’s feelings, since she’d felt that she was talking to them. “I’m simply concerned about the kids,” she said.

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By Carl Deuker

Alec’s grandpa proves to be his best friend. But what happens when a best friend gets hurt and everything turns hopeless?

Kids at school think I’m a nerd. That’s because I don’t like basketball or football, but I do like chess and math. At home it’s just about the same, though nobody calls me names. My dad and my mom and my older brother Jake are always riding bikes or running half-marathons or rowing boats, and they’re always trying to get me to go. “Come on, Alec. Give it a try.” When I tell them no, they shake their heads, and I know what they’re thinking: nerd.

That’s why Grandpa is so important to me. He saved me.

Every summer my grandparents rent a cabin up in the Cascades. I’ve got a big family, so whenever we go, cousins and aunts and uncles are sure to be there. Hiking, fishing, swimming–day after day.

For years I was forced to go along. Everybody thought it was fun climbing up rocks and down into gulleys with mosquitoes biting you and sweat burning your eyes. They couldn’t believe I didn’t think it was fun, no matter how often I told them.

Then Grandpa put his foot down. “Alec doesn’t like going, so stop making him,” he said, staring at my dad the same way my dad sometimes stares at me.

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There was once a little girl named Alizabeth. She lived up in the mountains where there was snow and woods with her mother and father and her older brother John. Alizabeth always walked to school by herself every morning. One morning when she was walking to school, she tripped and fell. She looked up and saw a big, hairy creature. It looked like Bigfoot, but she wasn’t sure what it was. She screamed and stared at the creature. And the creature just stared right back at her. So she got up and ran home, and the hairy creature followed her home.

When she got home, she showed the rest of the family the hairy creature. They didn’t know what to do so they called the police. A tired cop answered the phone. The cop said, “Hello.” She was sort of grumpy. Alizabeth’s dad said, “There’s a big, hairy creature that my daughter ran into on the way to school.” And the police lady said, “Uh-huh. Right. So let me get this straight. There’s a big, hairy creature that your daughter ran into on the way to school and the creature followed her home. Listen, Mister, every time I get calls about big creatures, I come and the creature is not there.”

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“Chessie, look what I found.”

I was lying on the rug in my room, watching the rainbow that my mirror makes on the floor at the same time every day. I was wishing that it weren’t Thursday, and that Mom wasn’t at the hairdresser, and that I could be at Beth’s working on my history assignment. I was also wishing that someday Peter would call me Jessie, not Chessie.

“Chessie, why didn’t you answer me? Hey–what are you doing lying on the floor? What are you looking for? Do you want to see what I found?”

Peter appeared in the doorway of my bedroom. He was mostly freckles and missing front teeth, disguised as a brown-haired, seven-year-old boy.

They should have named him Question Martin Rogers instead of Peter Martin Rogers. I have never heard anyone who could ask so many questions at once.

“Why aren’t you outside playing with your trucks?” For a change, I asked Peter a question.

“Because I wanted to show you this.”

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Dear Admissions Office,

I would like to use this college application essay to explain two blemishes on my record: an F in my creative writing class and a suspension for nearly killing my teacher It is my hope that if you know the whole story, you will still consider admitting me to your institution.

You can see on my transcript that I usually get good grades. Science and math are my best subjects, and I hold my own in the others. One thing I am not, however, is a poet. Tell me “bear” rhymes with “butter,” and I’d believe you. My friend Meredith knew that when she talked me into taking a poetry writing class. I’m not trying to point fingers or pass the blame, you understand, just letting you know how it happened.

I’d been complaining because I had all these hard classes like physics, calculus, government, and French.

“My schedule is brutal,” I’d told her. “And I still need one more elective.”

“So take poetry with me,” she said. Meredith likes poetry. Even as a little kid she was always making up rhymes about birds and whatnot.

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My father, Jean-Baptiste Sanson, had christened in the church of Saint-Laurent two children: a daughter, who married Pierre Hérisson, executioner of Melun, and a son, myself. After my mother’s death, he remarried, his second wife from a family of executioners in the province of Touraine. Together they produced twelve children, eight of whom survived, six of whom were boys. All six eventually registered in the public rolls as executioners, my half brothers beginning their careers by assisting their father and then myself in the city of Paris.

My name is Charles-Henri Sanson, known to many throughout this city as the Keystone of the Revolution, and known to the rabble as Sans Farine–without flour–a pun based on my use of emptied bran sacks to hold the severed heads. I was named for Charles Sanson, former adventurer and soldier of the King and, until 1668, executioner of Cherbourg and Caudebec-en-Caux. My father claimed he was descended from Sanson de Longval and that our family coat of arms derived from either the First or Second Crusade. Its escutcheon represents another pun: a cracked bell and the motto San son: without sound.

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For Gabrielle FlannerY, coworker Dell Kingston is off-limits. But when she finds herself alone with him in the wilderness, she can’t resist his lips, his touch, his…

• Sexy marketing executive Gabrielle Flannery is determined to excel at her firm in Atlanta. But there’s one person standing in her way: Dell Kingston, her hot, smooth-talking coworker who claims all the clients. When a highly coveted camping-equipment account is up for grabs, Gabrielle’s boss can’t decide whether to give it to Dell or Gabrielle, so he comes up with an unconventional solution. Dell and Gabrielle must camp out in a state park to compete in a series of survival contests — and whoever wins the most contests gets the account. By the second day, Gabrielle is kicking Dell’s butt, but she wonders if her overly flirtatious colleague is letting her win so he can put the moves on her. When she’s in her tent that night. Dell comes by for a surprise visit, and Gabrielle has to decide if she wants to keep things professional or put in some erotic overtime.

My Sleeping Bag — or Yours?
Exhausted from the day’s competitions, Gabrielle Hopped down on a couple of sleeping bags spread out on the bottom of her tent. Even though she was pleased that she’d won the navigational and tent-pitching tests, she had to admit she was surprised that an avid camper like Dell was doing so poorly.

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