It wasn’t my idea. Sarah thought of it first. But I was excited from the time she said so, and I began to wash myself everywhere every day, and to keep myself clean after noontime too. 

Meantime we will express our darker purposes. Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Vienna, Warsaw, whence I took a cheap train to Ukraine. I boarded my train, found the couchette enveloped in

From Chicago to Chisinau: Aleksandar Hemon on the trail of an anarchist: "How did his hope so quickly turn to disappointment? How did the Land of the Free kill him, at the age of nineteen, months 

My daughter was born the day the Long War began. In the quiet times during labor, I listened to the explosions, wondering as I drifted into five minutes’ sleep whether the bombing had precipitated the contractions, or whether she was so remarkable a child that her entrance into the world should cause a war, a rearrangement of planets not entirely her own.

People all through the San Gabriel Valley will remember the summer of 1950: heat, smog and humidity made a hell of all these California cities and many deaths were imputed to it. Those who did not have to remain in the streets took cover behind drawn window shades and fanned 

Rudy was awake now but his body had not changed from its position of sleep. Under the sheet he lay coiled like a serpent, his knees and elbows and his face all nestled in a fat and private circle. His mother stood at his bedside.

He is not a lazy man, not a cruel man, not a sick, sad, or even unsuccessful man. He is just not the man I wanted to become.

He sits with his feet propped up on a desk reading a book. 

I know all about wails. Candide had a wail around his garden, Jonah had a whale-wall deep-down in midpassage. Meursault had his wall of sun. Bartleby, Melville’s man, had his cubicle and his staring wail.

He hoped his voice wouldn’t change tonight. “Old Man River” was coming up and he could do the accent, the bent back, the glory-struck expression. He knew how to use the whites of his teeth and eyes. 

The moment I hated most at Thurston’s came toward the end of Winston Fiefs tribute. I had tried to talk Margot out of having the service at Thurston’s at all. Moose didn’t belong in one of those fashionable horror shows at James W. Thurston’s, “The Memorial Chapel,” which are treated in the next day’s Times like Met openings or muscular dystrophy balls at the Waldorf.