introduction and contents

There’s a timeless quality to cultures—we are a recent species on this earth, yet ancestry and legacy blurs into infinity. Shakespeare always takes this theme to head & heart:

“And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,

 And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,

 And thereby hangs a tale.”

It is significant that Jaques quotes this pondering from a ‘fool’ in the forest of Arden, the refuge of the exiled Duke Senior. America, well before its ascendance as a world superpower, had such fools and forests and refugees. The tales of a nation are incumbent on the weave of cultures foraging for what they have—sometimes in amity, sometimes in enmity.

            The stories in this volume explore these cultural paths in samplings of plots that could be set ‘anywhere USA’. Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is an archetype of how an American comes to terms and comes of age, seemingly seamlessly; Morrison’s Beloved is as compelling an archetype, if such coming to terms and coming of age is unseemly and unseamed. Literature loves to range—dabble in the deductive, imagine the inductive—and these stories aim to honor that balance.

Notably, I’ve been away from America for nearly half my life. At age 26, I became a Peace Corps volunteer and learned something of the cultures of Turkmenistan. Thereafter, the cultures of the former Czechoslovakia have informed my family’s home. Tethers to America are forever in that weave, whether traveling back to my roots or the countless ways America ripples abroad. Like my volume Stara Evropa, stories here are necessarily my perceptions of a given cultural milieu—fictional to ensure no untoward exposure, autobiographical only to the extent that what these characters think or feel are permanently in me.

            Read them in the order that you like—some will cater to a regional recognition, others will intentionally remain amorphous. Eventually you’ll note that all include a poem of sorts. These are modest attempts to further range the voices, hint at lyrical realities that lie within us all. I’m grateful for a writer’s group in Prague’s Globe bookstore, without which these stories and embedded poems would not have taken such shape. Naturally, each of these stream-of-consciousness perspectives have many more to thank.

“The Presence”                       (for Marilyn)

“Cestoda”                                (for Viola)

“Lucky You”                             (for Kirsten)

“House Rules”                         (for Greg)

“Truculence”                            (for Karen)

“Retirement Speech”               (for Don)

“Grounded”                              (for Ben)

“Clutch”                                    (for Jonathan)

"Cadbury Memories”                (for Anneliese)

“Old Ekdal’s Influence”            (for Kateřina)

“Daedalus”                               (for Tilo)

“Gridlock”                                 (for Joshua)

“Behold the fowls of the air”     (for Eric)

“Transcendence”                      (for Cara)

“The Infancy of Memory”          (for Joseph)

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2018)