Présentation de l'éditeur
“These tales reinvigorate…the short story with a jittery sense of adventure.” —San Francisco Chronicle Dave Eggers—Pulitzer Prize finalist for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and author of What Is the What and The Circle, among other books—demonstrates his mastery of the short story."Another"
"What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust"
"The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water"
"On Wanting to Have Three Walls Up Before She Gets Home"
"Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance"
"She Waits, Seething, Blooming"
"Quiet"
"Your Mother and I"
"Naveed"
"Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone"
"About the Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her"
"Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly"
"After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"
Extrait
Another I'd gone to Egypt, as a courier, easy. I gave the package to a guy at the airport and was finished and free by noon on the first day. It was a bad time to be in Cairo, unwise at that juncture, with the poor state of relations between our nation and the entire region, but I did it anyway because, at that point in my life, if there was a window at all, however small and discouraged, I would- I'd been having trouble thinking, finishing things. Words like anxiety and depression seemed apt then, in that I wasn't interested in the things I was usually interested in, and couldn't finish a glass of milk without deliberation. But I didn't stop to ruminate or wallow. Diagnosis would have made it all less interesting. I'd been a married man, twice; I'd been a man who turned forty among friends; I'd had pets, jobs in the foreign service, people working for me. Years after all that, somewhere in May, I found myself in Egypt, against the advice of my government, with mild diarrhea and alone. There was a new heat there, dry and suffocating and unfamiliar to me. I'd lived only in humid places-Cincinnati, Hartford-where the people I knew felt sorry for each other. Surviving in the Egyptian heat was invigorating, though-living under that sun made me lighter and stronger, made of platinum. I'd dropped ten pounds in a few days but I felt good. This was a few weeks after some terrorists had slaughtered seventy tourists at Luxor, and everyone was jittery. And I'd just been in New York, on the top of the Empire State Building, a few days after a guy opened fire there, killing one. I wasn't consciously following trouble around, but then what the hell was I doing- On a Tuesday I was by the pyramids, walking, loving the dust, squinting; I'd just lost my second pair of sunglasses. The hawkers who work the Gizeh plateau-really some of the least charming charmers the world owns-were trying to sell me anything-little scarab toys, Cheops keychains, plastic sandals. They spoke twenty words of a dozen languages, and tried me with German, Spanish, Italian, English. I said no, feigned muteness, got in the habit of just saying "Finland!" to them all, sure that they didn't know any Finnish, until a man offered me a horseback ride, in American English, hooking his r's obscenely. They really were clever bastards. I'd already gotten a brief and expensive camel ride, which was worthless, and though I'd never ridden a horse past an amble and hadn't really wanted to, I followed him on foot. "Through the desert," he said, leading me past a silver tourist bus, Swiss seniors unloading. I followed him. "We go get horse. We ride to the Red Pyramid," he said. I followed. "You have your horse yourself," he said, answering my last unspoken question. I knew the Red Pyramid had just been reopened, or was about to be reopened, though I didn't know why they called it Red. I wanted to ride on a horse through the desert. I wanted to see if this man-slight, with brown teeth, wide-set eyes, a cop mustache-would try to kill me. There were plenty of Egyptians who would love t
