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Lawrence Dorr

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Brave New World

Lawrence Dorr Jules Verne's Le Tour du Monde en 80 Jours with its solid-red cover stuck out from among the other books on the shelves of the children's library, like a sign warning of dangers ahead. The book was their French mother's choice. His sister Agnes, who was fourteen, said it was beneath her. Her Latin class was discussing Aesop's Rana Rupta et Bos. Another inappropriately placed book was Huxley's Brave New World in German translation. It belonged to Fraulein…
Lawrence Dorr
September 1, 2013
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An Eagle’s Cry

It was five in the morning, the time in his experience—between four and five—when the condemned was wakened to be led out. It was always five in the morning that his stomach independently from his thoughts remembered another time, another country. He was only thinking of the lone, little goldfish he had put in the horses' drinking trough. His grandson had won it with a well-placed tennis ball at the Alachua County fair. There was no way he could tell…
Lawrence Dorr
December 1, 2011
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Plaintive Notes

Sitting in the hot tub at the end of the deck under a roof just transparent enough to let in light, he was surrounded on three sides by orchids, begonias, red-kalanchoes in hanging pots and large free-standing tubs of hibiscus. Visible from here were the deep-green woods, a dressage ring and a pasture with three, browsing, unicorn-like ponies. The scene reminded him of the letter of Eusebius Hirenomymus (a.k.a St. Jerome) written to his friend Marcella in 385 A.D. In…
Lawrence Dorr
August 1, 2008
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Just a Swimmer

The lap pool--wide at both ends to allow for volleyball nets--was sixty feet long. The middle part narrowed into a dangerous Dardanelles where he had to be careful to follow the tile markers on the bottom of the pool if he didn't want to smash his hands into the sides. He moved fairly fast, swimming with a modified butterfly stroke that allowed his body to stay in the water. It took him forty-five minutes to swim eighty lengths, the desired…
Lawrence Dorr
August 1, 2006
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Verity Unseen

Lawrence Dorr has been writing fiction in English for more than forty years. Previous collections of his fiction include A Slow, Soft River (1974), The Immigrant (1976), and A Slight Momentary Affliction (1987). Readers already familiar with him know that Lawrence Dorr is the pen name adopted by a Hungarian survivor of the disasters that visited Hungary before, during, and after World War II. Born in Hungary in 1926, Dorr has lived in the United States since the 1950s, but…
Lawrence Dorr
February 15, 2005
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Pushkin

The wind swirling trash on Kirov Street, the main thoroughfare of the district of Perchersk--an extension of Kiev--rose unhindered from the Dnieper, the river masking the smell of war, a mixture of the exhaust fumes of trucks, tanks, mobile artillery pieces, horses, wet uniforms, field kitchens, dead bodies rotting under collapsed masonry, and the smell that shook him with fear: the odor of singed hair and burned bodies. Earlier, when he reported in at the field hospital to receive his…
Lawrence Dorr
December 16, 2003