When they became outlaws they gave themselves new names. He chose Miles Braintree: the first part after Miles Davis, the second after Braintree, the T’s southernmost stop on the Red Line. 

Dear Billy, my lad—

Through channels as intricate as life itself, I have in hand a copy of Stylus. Thank you, thank you. Indeed I am not dead, though more I cannot say. You are, God bless you, one of the three people in the world who conceivably could care. 

Tomislaw Sztern’s father sent him to America with the advice that every human relationship from employment to love survives on exploitation. Sztern, now Tommy Sternlight, had been in vaudeville since arriving in New York in 1904, when thanks to a string of shrewd social maneuvers he landed a job in Albany sweeping up after performances.

When i arrived at Princeton, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings—younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of Lahore, but made through ingenious stone­masonry to look older

It turned out Harry Barnes was on his way back to the States from China. His friend Barney Jenkins had died from an infection of the kidneys the doctors in Hong Kong had been unable to diagnose

When I was very poor, and this I will tell you was not too long ago, I began to smoke cigarettes. The smallest luxury then recalled, I suppose, the greater ones when I was a child. I bought cigarettes to smoke

Nothing is more flattering to an artist than the illusion that he is a secret revolutionary. 

It happened like this. A week after the Six-Day War, Sam walked to the eastern bank of the Jordan River. He was working as a counselor that summer near Karameh, at a day camp for boys.

Who has ever dreamed that he has become a murderer and from then on has only been carrying on with his usual life for the sake of appearances? At that time, which is still going on, Gregor Keuschnig

She walked her house by day, discovering it. She sat on the rough wooden staircase to the basement in order to look at the singing orange light of the gas water heater. She used a letter opener