1. Where the Dead Speak Odessa, 1923: The executioners are all drunk, of course, and the snow is slippery as Prisoner Z stumbles to join the others before the firing squad. He pulls at his shirt, sweat-soaked, though he can see his breath. He’s worn it a week now. Beside him, fellow prisoners reeking of…
The restaurant is the most popular in town, and we wait the better portion of an hour for a table. There are eight of us gathered on the sidewalk. It’s late spring, the kind of mauvish gloaming hour that Virginia Woolf would have marked by the whirling and wheeling of rooks, but there are no…
Years ago, I went to a family reunion in rural Sweden, where the houses are red, yellow, or white, and the mailboxes bear the family’s last name. My grandfather was born Birger Johansson, but because the farmers on either side of his family’s farm were also named “Johansson,” Birger’s family decided to change their surname….
[M]odern man no longer communicates with the madman […] There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those…
I was rolling jeans into tubular bundles and tucking them into my suitcase, packing for Prague. This trip would be the longest that I’d been away from the kids, and also the farthest. “Don’t worry about us,” my husband said. “OK,” I said. “We’ll be fine,” he continued, sensing my anxiety. He handed me an…
“These cliffs must have many secrets.” It is a sentence that has floated, fully formed, in and out of my thoughts since I arrived in Ireland. Now I say the words aloud for the first time. Breda Roche’s expression sharpens. “That, they do.” Her gaze on the winding street ahead of our car is grave….
We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the Author. —John Keats, letter to John Reynolds, May 3, 1818 Prologue “I purpose…to make a sort of Prologue to the Life I intend to pursue.…I will clamber through the Clouds and exist.” —Keats, letter to…
Sun Ra claimed to hail from Saturn, but he and his Intergalactic Arkestra still had to suffer the trials of earthly travel. When his agent phoned us to say they’d be driving up early, a day before their hotel was expecting them, we had to scramble to find beds. Adam, our piano player, lived in…
Childhood is self-enclosed and timeless. In adolescence, a moment comes when we sense the future, if only vaguely and ecstatically. For me, that happened on a boarding school trip to Quebec. It was 1962 and I was fourteen. The circumstances of the excursion have gotten fuzzy in my memory, but I do know we traveled…
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