A few months ago I blogged that my old college friend Gina Ochsner has just released her second collection of short stories, entitled People I Wanted to Be. This week I noticed that Gina has a new piece of short fiction in the current (August 22nd) issue of The New Yorker, entitled “Thicker Thank Water.” The story begins as such:

In the spring of 1988, Vasya Brkic, waking from a dream in which she was a wolf, bit her husband’s neck and killed him in the bed they shared. The following spring, Marti Cosic, a saxophonist in a klezmer band, went crazy and killed his fellow band members-all seven of them-then beat himself to death with his saxophone. One year later, after swimming naked in the newly thawed River Daugava, Semyon Iossel, an unemployed engineer, built a flying machine and died after falling from a great height. His grieving widow distracted herself for a year by giving lectures on the dangers of gravity, then succumbed to a mysterious urge to throw herself in front of the Riga-Tallinn train and was pulped on the tracks.