My lil sister/niece/granddaughter/baby cousin doesn’t know she’s pretty, so she asks everybody, one post at a time. Her mom showed up at her high school graduation, no one had seen her in eight years. 

Riding back to the stockade after the long and leaden day on the road, Dooley sat stripped to the waist on a plank that crossed the body of the truck, looking at the pines, sand and palmettos.

There were moments in the life of Leavious Throop when she was all herself and all to herself. These moments had no relation to any other human being. They were not necessarily the highest or the best or even the most truthful. They simply appeared and had to be realized as such.

Here where we live, the avenues are deep and calm as alleys of a cemetery. The streets which run from the École Militaire to the Invalides seem somehow reserved for state funeral processions:

Mrs. Cutie Young lives in two rooms and drives a 1982 Ford Country Squire with the wood stickers peeling off, but her silverware collection used to be worth thirty thousand dollars. I sayused to because

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.

I walked the beach when all was dark, reciting the names of the forgotten, names languishing on dusty shelves, until the sun came out again. But are they forgotten names or only names in waiting?

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.

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.

Elena, his sister, was going to stay with him all August. Maybe it would bleed into September a little, she warned, and Andrés said that was fine. What else could he say? The house in Almería was as much hers as it was his, on paper—they’d inherited it from their father twenty years earlier. Andrés and Elena were French (they grew up in Paris), but their parents had been Spanish, Spanish exiles.