Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Apples: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Apples: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Apples: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Ebook25 pages14 minutes

    Apples: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love

    By Simon Van Booy

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of intensity and atmosphere. Love, loss, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy's themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.

    Included in this updated P.S. edition is the new story "The Mute Ventriloquist."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 23, 2010
    ISBN9780062001870
    Apples: A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love
    Author

    Simon Van Booy

    Simon Van Booy is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, including The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is the editor of three philosophy books and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

    Read more from Simon Van Booy

    Related to Apples

    Related ebooks

    Short Stories For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Readers Write: Shared Reading Memories, Appreciation of New Daily Format

      Oct 21, 2017

      Shared reading memories I was enchanted by Robert Klose’s Sept. 4 Home Forum essay, “How I became a reader of books.” It brought back memories of my more than threescore years of reading, even as a small child. Having experienced the pleasure of boo

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Little Mermaid

      Jan 1, 2020

      The Little Mermaid
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Blue Jay’s Dance

      May 10, 2017

      The Blue Jay’s Dance
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Feminist Rewrite of Lot

      Jun 8, 2021

      A Feminist Rewrite of Lot
      3 min read

    • Article

      Some Wars Are Just

      Nov 24, 2022

      Some Wars Are Just
      6 min read

    • Article

      Layover

      Sep 8, 2020

      Lara was supposed to have breakfast with Selin, a friend from middle school who had a long layover in Paris. It was eight thirty, and Lara was frustrated not to have the morning to herself before teaching in the afternoon. She loved the early, luxuri

      13 min read

    • Article

      Three Letters from Switzerland

      Aug 15, 2019

      Three Letters from Switzerland
      4 min read

    • Article

      ‘Too Much’: Featured Nonfiction from Rachel Vorona Cote

      Feb 25, 2020

      In Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today, Cote examines how the "unspoken rules" that govern the expression of women’s emotional and physical desires date back to the 19th century. The post ‘Too Much’: Featured Nonfiction from Ra

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jesse Paddock

      Dec 9, 2020

      I’d gotten what I’d wanted—a room full of books and time enough to read them—but at a cost. The post A Year in Reading: Jesse Paddock appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Saving Notre Dame

      Aug 17, 2021

      Saving Notre Dame
      6 min read

    • Article

      Samuel Pepys Would Have Been Huge on the Internet

      May 29, 2019

      Pepys’s fragmentary, digressive, contradictory, messy diary foreshadows our own individual self-fashioning. In Pepys we see Facebook; we see Twitter. The post Samuel Pepys Would Have Been Huge on the Internet appeared first on The Millions.

      13 min read

    • Article

      Watership Down

      Nov 6, 2017

      Watership Down
      6 min read

    • Article

      Time For Tea

      Jan 31, 2024

      Time For Tea
      9 min read

    • Article

      Our Christmas Puppy

      Nov 26, 2019

      Our Christmas Puppy
      6 min read

    • Article

      Tracing Footsteps Not My Own: Going Through the Motions, Learning to Write

      Jan 25, 2019

      This is a story about writing and failing and trying to feel less alone. I suppose it’s also about “finding myself” with Sandburg's same reckless ecstasy. The post Tracing Footsteps Not My Own: Going Through the Motions, Learning to Write appeared fi

      11 min read

    • Article

      Second Language

      Aug 14, 2017

      Second Language
      9 min read

    • Article

      'A Terrible Country' Follows An Ex-pat Who Returns To Experience Life In Russia

      Jul 11, 2018

      Andrei Kaplan, narrator of A Terrible Country, is a 33-year-old Russian-born American teaching on-line Russian literature courses. Andrei’s older brother, caught up in shady Russian business deals that “temporarily” require him to flee to London, beg

      3 min read

    • Article

      My Father’s House

      Apr 25, 2023

      My Father’s House
      6 min read

    • Article

      Marco

      Mar 1, 2022

      THE ALLEY STANK . Marco could feel the damp soaking into his tunic as he pressed his back against the wall, trying to seem like part of the shadows. He cursed himself. How could he have been so stupid? He knew if he stayed out after dark they might f

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Library of Gromma

      Jul 10, 2023

      Zac was sweating and panting as he reached the top of the hill. The crooked beams of the library loomed over him. He dropped the buckets of water, swore at the few drops that spilled, and escaped the piercing morning sun in the shade of the library.

      22 min read

    • Article

      Yohanca Delgado

      Mar 9, 2021

      The widow arrived at LaGuardia on a Sunday, but the rumors about the woman who had rented a big apartment, sight unseen, had taken an earlier flight. We had already reviewed, on many occasions and in hushed tones, in the quiet that comes after long h

      15 min read

    • Article

      The Library Of Gromma

      Feb 10, 2021

      Zac was sweating and panting as he reached the top of the hill. The crooked beams of the library loomed over him. He dropped the buckets of water, swore at the few drops that spilt, and escaped the piercing morning sun in the shade of the library. He

      22 min read

    • Article

      The Cairo Apartments

      Jan 10, 2021

      The Cairo Apartments
      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Apples

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Apples - Simon Van Booy

      Apples

      A short story from The Secret Lives of People in Love

      Simon Van Booy

      To Maddie

      Contents

      Begin Reading

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      Praise

      Credits

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      APPLES

      As night unraveled through the streets of Brooklyn, the sign outside Serge’s shoe repair shop glowed. The red neon burned through evening and into early morning. Anyone pacing the city, anyone lingering in the palm of a streetlight could not ignore the dazzle and low growl of bright gas pumped through tubes like blood in the shape of letters—a promise to all who passed that certain things never need go unmended.

      Below the neon sign, Serge’s display consisted of several pairs of shoes whose owners had never returned. Serge had painstakingly reconstructed them into sullen models of their former selves.

      Under a shelf of dusty Russian magazines was a broken chair for customers to wait while Serge hammered, glued, and stitched. The smell of glue was often overpowering, but it was a thick, fragrant odor that hypnotized customers into waiting quietly in their socks.

      The broken chair would not have supported the full weight of a person, but by some miracle had remained intact, beautifully ancient, with one leg suspended an inch above the carpet, as though

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1