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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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,…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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?”…

Read more

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…

Read more

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

Read more

I was present when someone asked the poet Sophocles: “How’s your sex life, Sophocles? Can you still make love to a woman?” “Shush, man,” the poet replied. “I am very…

Read more

(1) To need his glasses and be struck by an awareness that they are not at hand, an ordinary enough circumstance for Frederick Douglass, except sometimes it’s accompanied by a…

Read more

Some writers begin to write with talent, quickly earn a reputation among readers and critics, and then are suddenly silenced forever. We had two such men at the Yiddish Writers’…

Read more

Key West is Neil’s idea, and Mara can’t think of a reason to refuse. She knows next to nothing about the Keys, only that it’s expensive to buy bread and…

Read more

In this one he’ll only have one daughter and no other child. In this one he’ll be divorced and his ex-wife will live in California. In this one he’ll live…

Read more

Nowhere are we so exposed, so vulnerable, as on an elevated platform at a suburban train depot. In balmy weather, choosing to stand outside to await the 11:17 a.m. to…

Read more

Lee was the daughter of his mother’s hairdresser. Jim had been hearing about, but not really listening to, the saga of her troubles for what must have been a couple…

Read more

On my way home today I saw someone in the field, someone I once knew. I was coming down the road from a hill and saw him from a distance.…

Read more

The finalists were him and some other people, but really there was just him. Him filming his boy, who was riding a bike for the first time. A red-and-blue Spider-Man…

Read more

The old woman’s husband, even older than she, has lived long enough. She is careful not to say this to her daughters, to her brother, to the doctors. He’s had…

Read more

I sat in a taxi with Emma and her son, Stak, all three bodies muscled into the rear seat, and the boy checked the driver’s I.D. and immediately began to…

Read more

When Glory’s parents christened her Glorybetogod Ngozi Akunyili, they did not foresee Facebook’s “real name” policy, nor the weeks she would spend populating forms and submitting copies of her bills…

Read more

For almost a decade, Chris and I have received an annual visit from one of my former students, Jack Bail. This year is different. When, as usual, he emails to…

Read more

They got into our car at a stoplight. It was cold. We never lock the doors in back. There were two of them. At the apartment they terrorized us. It…

Read more