With the Time We Have Left: Stories

Abstract

A collection of eight literary short stories exploring the ways time is constructed, organized, measured, and experienced in the context of characters’ relationships with each other and with the changing environment around them. Through first-person and third-person modes, the stories use recurring imagery, compression of plot and character development, temporal jumps, and sectional narrative structures to destabilize typical chronologies and engender a reading experience that reflects reality’s dynamic velocities. New York’s Hudson River features prominently in the collection, serving as a portrait and a product of development, dilapidation, destruction, and renewal. Images of the shifting natural and man-made world mirror the similarly volatile dynamics that exist within characters’ interior lives. Several stories feature children and young people as they develop an awareness of cultural norms and fundamental truths—including the unceasing passage of time and the accumulation of loss that accompanies growing up. Growing old, too, is a frequent subject in these stories, as is disease, decrepitude, and death. Characters nearing the end of their lives are forced to confront the body’s weakness, memory’s subjectivity, nostalgia’s ability to shroud progress, and the stark but permeable boundaries between generations. The final and longest story in the collection follows the life of an educator from his first day of kindergarten until his granddaughter’s; in its swift, swooping structure and attention to the experience of Jewish immigrants in twentieth-century New York, it serves as an anchor for a collection interested in themes of displacement, transformation, learning, and legacy.