Whiting Award Winners
Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
The dining room was empty. There were dragons – dragon ashtrays, dragon statues, dragons carved into posts. In a remarkably misguided attempt at décor, there was also a profusion of mirrors. The result was upsetting.
Like most of the fight world’s habits, hand wrapping is both practical and ritual. Done properly, it protects the hands from damage without giving a fighter an unfair advantage. Like boxing gloves or a football helmet, wrapping functions as both armor and sword, a protective measure that allows you to hit harder and more frequently than you could without it. One of the officials murmured, “That’s beautiful.” Colonna said “Thank you” without looking up from his work.
Even as they entered, he could feel the place envelop him like a vapor with a smell of heavy, overcooked food, privation and dust. The lady taking tickets, old and wigged, with big bosoms, conspicuously switched from Yiddish to German, putting the interlopers on notice that they had been spotted. Eyeing the overblown placard for the play, showing a giant Jew with maniacal eyes throttling some stricken Gentile, he again wondered, Why did they huddle so, these people? And all the while he kept hearing this coarse, splattery jargon, so animated, with that catarrh as though a fishbone were stuck in the throat. There was a man selling hot tea from a samovar and another vending sticky cakes and ices. And the eating—everybody eating, gnawing apples and chewing sweet crackling dumplings from greasy sheets of brown paper. And that marshy barn-warmth of people huddling. It was too close for him.
The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…
I’m a Bolshevik now as well, I said, drawing myself up proudly. Bolshevism, I continued, drawing on notions I’d mastered just two or three days previous, is an international movement. I raised a mud-stained finger. Along lines of class.
But not along yours, child! said the first woman kindly. I had made the mistake of telling them about my family.
There’d be no place for Karl Peter Voxlauers in their movement, I promise you, the ex-lieutenant put in.
Best thing that he’s dead, then, I suppose, I said. That quieted them awhile.
What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases followed by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow also dismantle the internet’s fundamental profit model. At this point it’s clear that collapse will almost definitely come first. Barring that, we’ve got nothing except our small attempts to retain our humanity.
The dining room was empty. There were dragons – dragon ashtrays, dragon statues, dragons carved into posts. In a remarkably misguided attempt at décor, there was also a profusion of mirrors. The result was upsetting.
Like most of the fight world’s habits, hand wrapping is both practical and ritual. Done properly, it protects the hands from damage without giving a fighter an unfair advantage. Like boxing gloves or a football helmet, wrapping functions as both armor and sword, a protective measure that allows you to hit harder and more frequently than you could without it. One of the officials murmured, “That’s beautiful.” Colonna said “Thank you” without looking up from his work.
Even as they entered, he could feel the place envelop him like a vapor with a smell of heavy, overcooked food, privation and dust. The lady taking tickets, old and wigged, with big bosoms, conspicuously switched from Yiddish to German, putting the interlopers on notice that they had been spotted. Eyeing the overblown placard for the play, showing a giant Jew with maniacal eyes throttling some stricken Gentile, he again wondered, Why did they huddle so, these people? And all the while he kept hearing this coarse, splattery jargon, so animated, with that catarrh as though a fishbone were stuck in the throat. There was a man selling hot tea from a samovar and another vending sticky cakes and ices. And the eating—everybody eating, gnawing apples and chewing sweet crackling dumplings from greasy sheets of brown paper. And that marshy barn-warmth of people huddling. It was too close for him.
The following day, Pablo set the beetle loose, out of “pity,” he told me. (I believe that he was in Mr. White’s employ.) This had terrible consequences for us and our secret files, for that very night the bugs came rolling out of the jungle in a horrible unstoppable scuttling attack and seized me and carried me off down dim dizzy depths and under mountains and along the bottoms of warm shallow seas like my zombies with only a hollow reed in my mouth to keep air passages in working trim, and through sticky ferns and egg caches and incubators and subterranean cockroach classrooms of strategy and along abandoned mine shafts and eaten-away tunnels in hollowed-out documents in unused stacks in an obscure wing of a forgotten branch of a sealed-off area of the very Library of Congress…
I’m a Bolshevik now as well, I said, drawing myself up proudly. Bolshevism, I continued, drawing on notions I’d mastered just two or three days previous, is an international movement. I raised a mud-stained finger. Along lines of class.
But not along yours, child! said the first woman kindly. I had made the mistake of telling them about my family.
There’d be no place for Karl Peter Voxlauers in their movement, I promise you, the ex-lieutenant put in.
Best thing that he’s dead, then, I suppose, I said. That quieted them awhile.
What could put an end to the worst of the internet? Social and economic collapse would do it, or perhaps a series of antitrust cases followed by a package of hard regulatory legislation that would somehow also dismantle the internet’s fundamental profit model. At this point it’s clear that collapse will almost definitely come first. Barring that, we’ve got nothing except our small attempts to retain our humanity.