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Freshly minted from a small, inconsequential college of liberal arts, Stuart Rosenstein surprised his parents, his longtime girlfriend, and even himself when he decided neither to apply to graduate school nor to seek his fortune at an insurance agency or stock brokerage, but instead to accept his uncle’s offer to assume ownership of the uncle’s retail appliance business, a ramshackle enterprise cemented in an unfashi

March 20, 2004 Are you a fan of Sir Zymogen? Are you key to Sir Z, also known as the Blue Knight, because of his blue-tinted armor and deep blue eyes that set girls’ hearts a-flutter? I am, most definitely. I have stood by him through thick and thin, from the fierce Revenge of the Cloud People of Ish 151 to the terrifying Lizard Death March of Ish 196. I even liked the last story, and nothing was quite as hokey

Norman had been on me for months to let a gun in the house, and I kept saying no. Then we scored some dollars with a lottery ticket. Not the jackpot, mind you, but real money, enough to grant a wish or two. I wanted a raised deck outside the kitchen, for barbecues and parties and outdoor living, like they show in the magazines. Norman continued going on about the gun. So I gave in, and we got both. Norman insisted th

His skin glowed the color of mocha cappuccino, his muscles tapered into drawn bows and steely arrows, and his long, flowing locks took flight and landed in rhythmic accompaniment to his pounding legs and buttocks. “Fergus Falls,” he whispered. The woman, a strawberry blonde, writhed somewhere underneath him. She was visible only in splotches of feet, hair, and hands, the latter clasped against the middle

In the movie “Jaws”, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider slice open a shark’s alimentary canal in search of human remains. They find a few fish, a tin can, a license plate from the state of Louisiana, but no undigested parts of people. Throughout the scene Richard Dreyfuss holds his nose and makes faces, conveying the idea that the shark’s insides stink to high heaven. The shark in this scene is

On a cold morning in January, in a year that most Fergus Fallsians had assumed lay only in the distant future, Mayor Mingalone sequestered himself in his sumptuous, mahogany-paneled office, where diligently he attempted to ignore the electronic sign blaring his city’s name through the window and instead to concentrate on the question at hand, which was whether or not to run for another four-year term. |||Fergus Falls

I was standing in the park under that tree. I can tell you the park—it was Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, home of the Cardinals. And that tree was not a real tree—it was a billboard for the Missouri Federal Savings and Loan. The billboard was in the shape of a tree—they called it the Money Tree— and it hung just out of the outfielder’s reach over the center field wall. If a batted ball hit the Money Tree

The hangover was from either liquor or depression. Probably both. They came as a pair, the L and the D, like a vaudeville act. They came especially during an Iowa winter, and especially during that horrible winter through which Marlene was suffering. The baby was six months dead and buried. Gary had driven off in the sedan with no signs of returning. Money was tight and getting tighter. Marlene had canceled the cable

Arnold and Mary: A Love Story Arnold Knutson met his wife, the former Mary O’Boyle, at the Palmer House Hotel of Chicago, Illinois, on a hot August evening of the year Nineteen-hundred and twenty-two. He was a guest of the hotel, in town to convince the Chicago Grain Exchange to include mushroom futures among its tradable commodities. She was the waitress serving him in the hotel dining room. “They’re too