On a November Saturday in 1990, Pam went over to Joe’s place to listen to records. It was raining in sheets that whipped around the corners of buildings and blowing…

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The Gersons were a fairly unexceptional family. The maid had idly observed them upon their arrival at the Hotel Neversink as she vacuumed the length of the third-floor hallway. The…

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“Thank you for the honor. I am very—honored.” You have been instructed to remove the clumsy black mortarboard at this point in the commencement ceremony. Now you incline your head…

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All his life he lived on hatred. He was a solitary man who hoarded gloom. At night a thick smell filled his bachelor’s room on the edge of the kibbutz.…

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They were released. For the first time in seven years, they stood outside in the courtyard of the reeducation center. They looked across at the gate. They remembered none of…

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Bianca White, dressed in cream, was the first to arrive. All morning, she’d been looking forward to her lunch date with Ainsley Burton. In addition to being Bianca’s estranged best…

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Years ago, Ellie asked me to write the story of our friend Addie and the chili. The incident involved some bowls of chili, and more than one woman crying, in…

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I had finished lunch when I decided to attend the memorial service later that afternoon for Juno Wasserman, who had died the week before, just shy of seventy. Juno had been…

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H e is a nondescript man. I’d never used that adjective about a client. Not until this one. My seventeenth. He’d requested an evening time and came Tuesdays at six-thirty.…

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Her bathroom was a wreck. This tiny, ruinous space. The contractor had tiled the walls askew and had to start over. He’d set the tub askew and had to start…

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The few white boys in our town could ball. Breakaway layups, nothing-but-the-bottom-of-the-net free throws, buzzer-beater fadeaways. They slept with basketballs in their beds and told us about their dreams. We…

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Mr. Hutchinson took his pipe out of his mouth. “Got a new dog, I see.” He was wearing his buff-colored work suit, which he wore every day because, he said,…

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After Bonin liberated the Scots’ pelts, we rode the lower trail until we come to a ford in the river where the Frenchman run his ferry. But the barge was…

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Today I did something and I have no idea why I did it. I followed someone, two people actually, but it was the woman I was really following, the man…

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I was seventy when I met Richard. He was thirty-two. He told me he was a young man, and I didn’t respond to that because I really didn’t know what…

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His wife had worked at jigsaw puzzles like he imagined beavers worked at logs. If you were a beaver and you worked at logs, you probably had a saying or…

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He had wanted to make sure she wouldn’t write about him, but he knew he couldn’t ask her outright not to write about him, since he was sure such a…

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My first year teaching at the university my father killed a man. I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember the man’s name, though I recall the man a good buddy…

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The Regina Palast was an immense, monumental gray stone cube of a hotel, built in 1908, with Versailles-style reception rooms, a Turkish bath in the basement, and three hundred bedrooms…

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To look at him, Sweet Macho was a beautiful horse, lean and strong with muscles that twitched beneath his shining black coat. A former racehorse, he carried himself with ceremony,…

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Abby was a breech birth but in the thirty-one years since then most everything has been pretty smooth. Sweet kid, not a lot of trouble. None of them were. Jack…

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The fight began in a tavern called the All Star, on the outskirts of Sacramento, when a young man named James Sutter leaned over and said, vaguely, as if to…

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When I came into the kitchen, Ward was using a knife to help his wife, Irene, peel the skin from two buffalo tongues. The skin was discarded in a small…

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On the eve of independence, Sir William drove away from the estate in his cream-colored Morris and left his fortunes in the hands of Mr. Balakumar, the Tamil manager, who…

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ocial historians will record that in the early twenty-first century the fashion for a clean-shaven face lost its dominance in metropolitan North American bourgeois society. (The no-nonsense goatee-mustache, associated with…

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Jed came downstairs. He worked mostly in the sleeping loft, writing serious journalism. His current project was about a friend’s imprisonment on charges related to terrorism. He said, “Laurie.” “What?”…

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Mrs. B’s Baby Village Day Care was on a frontage road between a mattress wholesaler and a knife outlet. There were six or so babies as regulars and another one…

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This is the story. Kim Le Bouedec and I run the Finchley Mint. And I’ve just kissed his wife.

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