by Peter Turchi
SOLUTIONS
THE MILLER’S PUZZLE
The sacks should be arranged to form 2, 78, 156, 39, 4. Each pair multiplied by its single neighbor equals 156. There are three other possible solutions, but they all require moving more sacks.
THE POETIC LINE
The puzzle is from Martin Gardner’s The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems, where he attributes it to Walter Penney of Greenbelt, Maryland. The scrambled quotation, “There is no frigate like a book / To take us lands away,” is by Emily Dickinson.
THE BARBER IN GENEVA
would make twice as much money. Thanks again to Martin Gardner.
SYNONYMS?
This puzzle appeared in US Airways Magazine, June 2012, copyright © 2012, reprinted with the permission of Pace Communications.
WORD GOLF
love lave have hate
dirt dart dare bare bate bath
FOUR LETTERS
Also from Martin Gardner’s The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems. The consecutive letters R, S, T, U will spell “rust” or “ruts.”
Peter Turchi’s books include Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; a novel, The Girls Next Door; a collection of stories, Magician; a collection of stories; Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie, in collaboration with the artist; and a limited edition artist’s book of his story “Night, Truck, Two Lights Burning,” with images by Charles Ritchie. He has coedited, with Andrea Barrett, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft and The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work; and, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. Turchi’s stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and the Colorado Review. He has received Washington College’s Sophie Kerr Prize, North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. For fifteen years he directed the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina; he then directed and taught in the MFA Program at Arizona State University. He currently teaches at the University of Houston and for the Warren Wilson MFA Program. For more information about this book as well as other resources for writers, visit peterturchi.com.