Years later, my grandmother would still tell people that I learned to swim in a movie star’s pool, though she always said this with the same slanted tone and pinched…

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From Synthesizing Gravity, a collection of essays, which will be published this month by Grove Press. It is easy to be sentimental about memory because of its powers to intensify.…

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From A Primer for Forgetting, out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. anti-mnemonicsUmberto Eco writes that “once, as a joke, some friends and I invented advertisements for university po­sitions…

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By J. M. Coetzee, from The Good Story, out last month from Viking. The book collects a series of exchanges between Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, a psychotherapist, on the correspondences…

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By Sarah Manguso, from Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, out in March from Graywolf Press. Manguso is the author of several books, including The Guardians and The Two Kinds…

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