I really hate these readings, the famous author comes and reads from his book and then there’s a discussion afterwards, and you can ask questions, I was the first to raise my hand, and he said, you

Ah, Bixby, Mettro, Manishin and Marx. Sitting here in my high-ceilinged under-priced West End Avenue Co-op, waiting for my wife to come by and leave the keys for the last time, I am giving a party in my head.

My father’s last aunt moved in with us when I was ten and she was a thousand. Eighty-three, to be truthful, and virgin pure but sadly broke down. She’d lived near us, in her family home, all her life and

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was

Used to be, I was always saying, This doesn’t count. I lived my life in secret, like if nobody saw, I didn’t really have it. I was barely there. I wouldn’t admit to a thing. Now I know that what humans observe

You are sitting, naked from the waist up, wearing only pajama bottoms, in your garret, on the narrow bench that serves as your bed, with a book. Raymond Aron’s Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society

Before the dawn of history, when the earth was still flat and the oceans ran out to the edges and fell off into space, back so far in time the sun had not yet risen, the world was a very dark place, so dark

Ivan Pomorenko sat on a dry hummock near the mosquito-netted entrance to the bunker. Earlier he heard heavy vehicles moving, probably German, and assumed that they were building a temporary road

Light striking water in the vase of branches casts a sundog on the pale green blotter of the old man’s desk and he is halfway through the letter he is writing when it dawns on him the friend to whom this letter is addressed is gone. He’s dead, this friend. This friend of his who’d like this letter, how could he forget?

Lord Byron’s doctor and traveling companion, John Polidori, was dead by his own hand at twenty-six, having taken a potion he himself had brewed, based on prussic acid; but then, all through his time in Europe as part of Byron’s entourage, he had been trying out one form of suicide or another.