“The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.”
—James Joyce, from “Araby,” Dubliners (1914)
I was exactly like this narrator when I was a boy: prone to crushes that I could not express, confounded by religious symbolism, frustrated by the adults in my life, and Irish in the lyrical sense.*
*I love this sentence so much, I appropriated a portion of it in my novel Without Wax: “We fucked until we glowed.”
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William Walsh is the author of Forty-Four American Boys, Stephen King Stephen King, Unknown Arts, Ampersand, Mass., Pathologies, Questionstruck, and Without Wax. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Big Other, Quarterly West, New York Tyrant, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He is the editor of RE:Telling.
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Of all the short stories I’ve read in my life, “Araby” is probably my favorite.
Araby is weird one–the boy’s eyes burning with anguish and anger–the bazaar with its off celtic orientlaism. love it.