Recently I was researching an article for a woman’s magazine, whose considerate editor had already entitled it—Con-Men: Their Games And Their NAMES—aiming, with the final emphasis for a bit of the

A summer Saturday in Dallas and the boy Howard sat out on the back steps, knees up, propping in between, an old single load, twelve-gauge shotgun. While he steadied and squeezed the butt in one hand, the other, with studied unbroken slowness, wrapped a long piece of friction tape around and around the stock

Dr. Eichner was a man of remarkable bearing, slightly above six feet, slender, with well set shoulders and a magnificently grey, patrician head. He stood on the clinic’s shaded front veranda, waiting for his car to be sent around.

Sid Peckham and his wife were coast farmers and Sid was a veteran of World War II. They were eeking out the narrowest sort of existence on a little plot of ground just east of Corpus Christi, about an eighth of a mile from the Gulf.

The ridiculous “taxi” swerved clownishly into the drive way of number 29, neatly clipping a (no doubt) cherished bough of white freesia from its parent bush, the blanched and waxen bells evoking with their split perfume momentarily—but just momentarily—the sunlit riverbank of my childhood, with its cool ferns (mist, borscht, mother, midges) and rescuing from their lunatic perambulations my disordered thoughts, which, like so many crazed sheep, had been straying far from their comfy ancien regime fold ever since I set foot on this ridiculous continent.

Draw a circle of approximately one inch diameter in the center of your paper. Fill it in. This is your Speck and the sheet is now your Speck Sheet.

Change your thoughts and you will change your world. It’s guaranteed for ninety days. You can’t buy a man with a cup of coffee and a sandwich. Spread out mats for him. Offer him stools. Let the host present the cup, the guest will return it. 

My colleague Alassio is the only person left at the school where I teach who believes that the working class is the engine of history.

All night the sleeper sleeps close to a board, irons rattle, a violin played aft vibrates along the side, the body of the ship rises and falls, the engines beat on through seven hundred sleeps. The first day, yellow cliffs, blue coasts, next day, the steep green island south; a new world. Homeward bound on that ship in 1928, a Lithuanian woman in grey knitted skullcap, fifty five, short, sour, salty; a tall English woman, eighty-four in black, small hat and scarf, who stands for hours by the lounge wall waiting for the Great Bezu to rise; a missionary woman, thirty-nine invalided home, worn by tropical disease, her soft dark skin like old chamois; she is going back to the town, street, church she left eighteen years before, because of a painful love-affair with the pastor: his wife now dead, he has just married a girl from the choir, “Just as I was then,” she says.

George Paul came to see the Deans, man and wife, soon after dinner. Tall, ample, muscular, blue eyes in a red boyish face, thick bronze hair in a brush cut, he was fifty years old; but walking like a young man from the exercises he did to keep fit; and energetic, a restless worker. He looked tired and anxious.