by Vincent Panella | May 7, 2020 | The First Glass
It’s quiet on the Augur Hole Road, but not as quiet as during those Hurricane Irene days when the brook across from our house was one foot above road level and racing down the valley with its flotsam of trees and twisted culverts. After the storm there was an eerie...
by Vincent Panella | May 5, 2020 | The First Glass
Once long ago I needed a job. A friend had just quit as a reporter for a large Midwest newspaper and he suggested I take his place. I’d never worked as a news reporter, but I’d taken a J-School course and had recently written a piece about racing pigeons...
by Vincent Panella | May 4, 2020 | The First Glass
There’s a Hemingway story called Now I Lay Me in which he fears sleeping at night ever since he was struck by a mortar during World War I – ‘blown up’ as he puts it. To fall asleep in darkness would cause his soul “to fly out of his body,’ that is, he would...
by Vincent Panella | May 3, 2020 | The First Glass
She was sitting in front of the TV, remote in hand, water, books, and pills on the side table. She lowered the sound when he came in and sat, his back hurting from the day’s work. I don’t think I’ll be able to get up. You poor thing. Bent over a sink...
by Vincent Panella | May 2, 2020 | The First Glass
Twain didn’t like it when he had a situation but no story. Tell that to any writer. As a college student I worked summers in my father’s bar in upstate New York. Newburgh was a poor Hudson River town with such social ills that my father’s business would soon become a...
by Vincent Panella | May 1, 2020 | The First Glass
DEMOLITION Primo Levi’s Moments of Reprieve is a story collection based on his one-year stay in Auschwitz. The stories follow his other writings about the experience, and for those those who don’t know, Levi was an Italian Jew and trained chemist. In 1943 he joined a...
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