“North Of” by Marie-Helene Bertino
Recommended by Jim Shepard
Issue No.3
THERE ARE AMERICAN FLAGS on school windows, on cars, on porch swings; it is the year I bring Bob Dylan home for Thanksgiving.
We park in front of my mom’s house, my mom who has been waiting for us at the door, probably since dawn. Her hello carries over the lawn. Bob Dylan opens the car door, stretches one leg and then the other. He wears a black leather coat, and has spent the entire ride from New York trying to remember the name of a guitarist he played with in Memphis. I pull our bags from the trunk.
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Author’s Bio
Marie-Helene Bertino’s collection of short stories Safe as Houses received the 2012 Iowa Short Fiction Award, judged by Jim Shepard, and will be published October 1, 2012. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXIII, North American Review,Mississippi Review,Inkwell,The Indiana Review,American Short Fiction ,Five Chapters,West Branch, and the Mississippi Review’s 30 (an anthology of 30 years of publishing). She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times, receiving the award in 2007 and a Special Mention in 2011. She hails from Philadelphia and lives in Brooklyn, where for six years she was the Associate Editor of One Story. She has taught for The Gotham Writer’s Workshop and One Story’s Emerging Writer’s Workshop and was an Emerging Writer Fellow at NYC’s Center for Fiction. If you like her, click here. If you like her like her, buy her a trumpet or give her a drum.
Guest Editor
Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, including most recently Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize, and You Think That’s Bad, released in 2011. His stories have been included in the Best American, PEN/O.Henry, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He teaches at Williams College.
“North Of” copyright c 2007 by Marie-Helene Bertino. Originally published in the Mississippi Review (Volume 35, Numbers 1 & 2). Reprinted in Pushcart Prize XXXIII (2009). To be published in Safe as Houses, October 2012, University of Iowa Press/Iowa Short Fiction Award.
