Anthony Doerr|Oranges|r.kv.r.y Archives

Faculty member Anthony Doerr speaks with r.kv.r.y Quarterly about history as memory and his short story “Oranges.”

…I was beginning to understand that I was only going to exist on Earth for an appallingly brief time: that I was hopelessly mortal. This knowledge is what made me want to communicate some sense of the larger scales of time in my own work. For years I couldn’t figure out how to do it. But when I came across Munro, and saw how she used time (and then later Andrea Barrett, and Italo Calvino), that she didn’t believe short stories had to take place in one evening, or in one room, or in one day, I found my permission.

Incidentally, this knowledge, that life is short, is what made me decide, at a ridiculously early age, that I wanted to be a writer: I wanted to do what I loved to do before I ran out of time...[Keep Reading]…

Anthony is the author of the short story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector (2011, Scribner).

Faculty member Anthony Doerr‘s short story “Oranges” appears in the current issue of r.kv.ry Quarterly:

He’s in 13C. She’s in 13B. He’s moving west to take a job teaching history to seventh graders. She’s heading home from a nursing conference. He’s gangly, earnest, and scared. She has brick-red hair and eyes shaped like daisy petals.

After takeoff she produces two oranges from a monstrous purple handbag and offers him one. He tears off the peel into a hundred tiny pieces. When he looks over she has somehow unzipped her orange and her peel sits on the tray table in a single, mesmerizing spiral.

“How did you—?”

“You’re cute,” she says.

She eats it as if it were an apple: huge bites. Threads of juice spill down her chin. The flight attendant brings napkins. The cabin lights dim. She leans across him to look out the window at stars and he smells cloves, ocean wind, orange blossoms...[Keep Reading]…

Anthony is the author of The Shell Collector: Stories (2011, Scribner).

Tag Archive for: Anthony Doerr|Oranges|r.kv.r.y

Interview with Anthony Doerr

Oranges

FOW FORUM