Long before they planted beets in Argus and built the highways, there was a rail road. Along the track, which crossed the Dakota-Minnesota border and stretched on east to Minneapolis, everything that made the town arrived.

If you’re the only son of uptown Kingston parents, then you will have options. You can take Daddy’s Datsun or Mummy’s new ’68 VW and fly past street urchins who sell bag juice and ackee at red lights down Hope Road to pick up Reyha or Sanya or Cherie.

An ad hoc group of ten longtime and tentative friends rents a house on the Spanish island of Formentera. 

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was

I had not seen Samuel for years, but his letters annoyed me. They were so melancholy, so sad. I couldn’t figure it out. In 1970 I returned to Manhattan for the summer and called him. “I’m double the size I was when you knew me; so is Doris; we eat all the time. Don’t you?” We made a date and I broke it—too depressing.

Even when I ran into Grinaldi, my psychiatrist, seated on a bench with a pigeon on his head in Washington Square Park, or eating dinner in Bickford’s among the old men who lived in single rooms, he had an air of calm and certainty that re-assured me.

Stiff as a ramrod, a straight arrow, six foot three, his face a starched white, Isaac Zavelson stands in the elevator beside some of the other employees of Jews for Israel, waiting for it to move. Entering 

Me and Jasmine and Michael were hanging out at Mr. Thompson’s pool. We were fifteen and it was the first weekend after school started, and me and Jasmine were sitting side by side on one of Mr. Thompson’s

The gray square above is meant to stand in for a photograph of my dead wife, may she rest in peace. For a photograph, that is, of my wife dead and in her coffin, which I took during the first moments of the 

The summer that Henry Wilder was in love with Jane Pratt—he was fifteen then—he was also much under the influence of Otis Purney.