Short stories by Jess Row
Jess Row is the author of two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost, a novel, Your Face in Mine, and a collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. In 2007, he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, among other venues. He teaches at the College of New Jersey and is an ordained senior dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen. He lives in New York City and Plainfield, Vermont.
Listing 6 stories.
As a Chinese-American widower and professor of philosophy contemplates the life he has provided his two daughters, he recalls a traumatic memory from his youth as a delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant, riding through the dangerous streets of New York City.
In Michigan, a recently divorced professor reflects on what it means to exist, first alone in his empty apartment and then alongside his student in a mission to find a missing girl.
After losing his young daughter, a middle aged former NSA agent very consciously moves through his own stages of grief.
After one of his patients develops severe dementia and begins speaking only in Korean, a Black male nurse develops a relationship with the patient's daughter.
In a post-apocalyptic Vermont of the near-future, a former writer picks up her old craft once more in an attempt to document the before and after of her resource-starved, disease-plagued world.
A young American teacher grows close to a troubled student who believes she can echolocate like bats.