Colm Tóibín is a gentleman. A very witty, charming, lively, and sometimes deliciously louche gentleman, but a gentleman all the same, though one senses that he might not wish for that to be said too loudly. He has the beauty of a boxer—strong chest, light on his feet, precise in his movements and in his…
b. h. fairchild The Game Field lights that span the evening sky, siren songs of kind, loud girls in thigh-high skirts, the clatter of our shoulder pads and cleats, and then the crowd in its great hunger rising up as we stride across that green plane bright with new lime and dreams of high school…
Getting out of his car one night, he discovers—No! It’s gone!—the ring he’d worn on his left pinky for more than thirty years. He treasured it. Not because an old lover had given it to him—she’d stopped meaning anything to him decades ago. But because it was an elegant thing: “like gold to airy thinness…
Voyager 2 traveled another 800,000 miles today. Launched on August 20, 1977, the spacecraft is still sending data to the radio telescopes of the Deep Space Network in the Mojave desert around Goldstone. Any information dispatched today—about the solar winds that Voyager is flying through—will have taken thirteen hours to travel back 8.6 billion miles…
I am thirty-two, thirty-two times have I passed before the day and hour of my death, as one passes by the door of a house that one will someday live in, without even a thought of glancing at it. —Julian Green, Diary: 1928-1957 It could be empty, windowless, or simply occupied by ghosts, a kind…
My old boyfriend’s fortune cookie read, Your love life is of interest only to yourself. Not news to me. A famous writer once showed me the fortune in his wallet— You must curb your lust for revenge— slapped over his dead mother’s face. After finishing our Chinese meal at that god-forsaken mall, eight of us…
Reprinted from Issue 18 of Ploughshares, Fall 1979.? (guest-edited by James Randall) Seamus Heaney has been at Harvard University teaching two writing courses during the Spring semester. The interview took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Michael Mazur’s studio with James Randall and Seamus Heaney seated on a couch, tape recorder between them, and Michael Mazur…
Through the skein of years, I had nothing to fear from this place. How final and brief it would be to disappear from this place. The tangle of driftwood and Coke cans and kelp in the sand made me think of the muddle that drove us (my dear) from this place. An orchard, a vineyard,…
That dog never barked, not a whimper, so it was heaven living next door to Pickwick and his mistress, Elzbieta, the Polish novelist on Brattle Street, my first apartment, my first year out of grad school. Elzbieta escaped the Warsaw ghetto, then worked for the Resistance during the war. What had I accomplished at 24?…
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