The land was flat, almost barren, the grass grown wild and untended between the trees which stood spread like outpost sentinels, lonely under the immense sky. He hadn’t seen another car, 

 The following is an excerpt from a novel entitled The Confessions of Nat Turner, based on the life of the leader of the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery.

In the fall of 1985, the writer William Styron fell into a deep depression. The author of celebrated novels such as The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Sophie’s Choice (1979), he ceased writing that autumn and entered a period of intense brooding and near-suicidal despair. He was admitted to the neurological unit of Yale–New Haven Hospital on December 14 and stayed there for almost seven weeks. Rest and treatment allowed him to regain his equilibrium; he returned to his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, in early February, and by that summer was writing again.

Captain Hipp and his background made me ever more fascinated by a theory I had often played with. Which was: you didn’t have to be a Southerner to be a good marine, but it certainly did no harm.

It all came about like this. Poppy, whose religious activity had been intense all through the Lenten season (at times Cass had thought that if she brought one more fish into the house he would throttle her), reached a kind of peak of fervour during Holy Week; unremittingly, she had addressed herself to all sorts of complicated rites and offices, in pouring rain dashing out to see the various Stations—whatever that meant—and it was at one of these, Cass knew not where—at the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, perhaps, or that other one, with the Giotto fresco, San Giovanni in Laterano—that she encountered an American couple, the McCabes.

The moon is out and full. The sky is that near blue of bright clear nights, so bright that one can see only a few of the brightest stars. On the horizon the sharp, barren mountains, then the desert, like a sea. 

CHAIR

When I was small my parents would host a lot of parties. I don’t know if they had more friends then or were just, as people say, “at a more social place in their lives,” but at least once a month there would be a bunch of adults in our apartment, drinking crappy wine and trying to play our untunable piano. There is something powerful for a child about your parents having people over. It’s not anything that happens at the parties but the evidence they give you that people feel safe where you live. That must go back to the savanna. Sometimes things happened at the parties that I was probably too young to see, but nothing scarring, just grown-up scenes.

I once dated a girl who, when faced with restaurant toast, would take only one bite of each of her four restaurant-toast halves. She said she didn’t want any of the restaurant-toast halves to feel neglected.

At first Ernestine was completely overwhelmed with the wonder of the nieces and nephews. As she remembered it, she had been like a dancer, moving gracefully from one side of the stage to the other, turning her well-shaped head, as if in search, trying to decide on which of the children 

Not the scent of the smoke, but the sight of it, not the sight itself, but the screen through which it altered the sunlight—she couldn’t articulate the change exactly, it’s just that the light seemed odd, like the acidic light of a nightmare.