The revolution is coming, Rhys says so, and it’ll be just like we always dreamed: blood, streets. First day in Yangon, time- lagged and tongue-tied from my trip across the Atlantic. “Things will be changing soon,” Rhys says. “The situation is not stable.” His accent is hard to figure. The words rise liquid from his quivering paunch. “What part of Australia is he from?” I ask an Aussie. “The drunk part,” the Aussie says.

I dreamed that I was woken by a phone call. It was Mr. Pere, who wanted me to come—he offered to take me—to the Guardia Civil headquarters; they had a body there and they were hoping that I could identify it.

Today, for the first time, we woke up to gray skies. From our window, the beach looked majestic and empty. A few children were playing in the sand, but soon it began to rain and one by one they disappeared.

The man who built this house—Royall Brown, 1750–1797—is buried in the graveyard up across the road, along with his wife, his son, and his son’s wife and children. I’ve outlived him, at least in the sense that he was forty-seven and I’m now sixty-one. 

Earliest memory: father tripping on strewn toys, hopping with toe outraged, mother’s rolling eyes. For my father had toys himself. He once brought a traffic light home to our apartment on the thirty-somethingth floor of the tower on Columbus Avenue. 

I once brought a girl home because I liked her shoes. That was the only thing I noticed about her. I live in a really small apartment. A lot of my clothes end up piled on my mattress or draped over the open door of the microwave.

By the time of his death in 2003, at age fifty, Roberto Bolaño was already a somewhat legendary figure. A Chilean who spent most of his life in poverty and exile, Bolaño helped found the Infrarealist poetry movement in Mexico City. Later, he settled in the town of Blanes, on Spain’s Costa Brava.

This isn’t that classic conceit where you tell a story about someone and it’s really just a story about yourself.

I was sitting at a long table with a lot of nice things on it. There was a large pitcher of ­water with an ornate handle that looked like it was made of real silver, and there were forks and spoons. 

This happens every summer. A tourist hikes into the desert outside Las Vegas without enough water and gets lost. Most of them die. This summer it’s an Italian, a student, twenty years old, according to the Nye County Register.