Essays & Shorts

FEATURED STORY:

Whitmore, 1969Back from Vietnam, seeking salvation in Bob Dylan

by Dominic Smith

Atlantic Monthly CoverWe drove under a tin-white sun. In Des Moines, my brother and I had each dropped a tab of acid and now the Midwest rushed at us—great rows of corn and swaths of open field, a startling horizon of alfalfa haze. We stared out at a diorama of little wooden bridges and clapboard houses, processions of blinking radio towers, neither of us speaking. My brother, Whitmore, drove like a man skipping bail, forcing my father’s Oldsmobile into a high-pitched whinny. He streamed his hand out the window, his knuckles whistling in the wind. Slightly mesmerized, I watched his hand as it fishtailed into an elegant sine curve. We were listening to Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home on the eight-track. It was the summer of 1969. Men were getting ready to land on the moon. The girls I knew wore slacks and smelled of sandalwood and cherry vodka. You could fit the whole world inside an album cover.

My brother had his other hand on the wheel, his index finger raised like a flagpole, in exclamation at the music. He seemed to be saying, Here, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you. When "It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)" played, I saw a single tear appear in my brother’s right eye. I looked out my window at the neon-green farms and the heat shimmering off the blacktop roads, pretending not to notice. Whitmore was twenty-three—four years older than I was. He had returned to us a few months earlier, after a two-year stint in Vietnam. In the Los Angeles airport, as he disembarked from his trans-Pacific flight in uniform, a young woman with braids spat at him. This event had dogged him all summer.

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OTHER WRITING:

My review in The New York Times Book Review of Richard Bausch's Living in the Weather of the World. My review in The New York Times Book Review of War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans. My essay on our enduring fascination with art forgery and my email exchange with a master forger as research for The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.
 Read my reading list of the great fictional artists from literature.

Burns & Falls

Finalist, 2014 Nelson Algren Award

Essays on The Millions
"How Many Novelists Are at Work in America?"

"The Literature of the Standing Desk"

"Where is all the Fiction in Space?"

"J.D. Salinger and US Copyright"

 Short Story: "The Projectionist" (2004)
Winner 2004 Gulf Coast Fiction Prize Short Story: "The Hazelbrook Herald" (2002)
Winner Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize Short Story: "String Theory" (2003)
3rd Place, Raymond Carver Short Story Award Essay: "Salinger’s Nine Stories: Fifty Years Later"
The Antioch Review (2003)