This was an average dawn in the early summer of 1948, the year I got to be eighteen. “Eat your fishcake, Dougie,” said Lou. They were barracuda fishcakes. Awful. They tasted like it was the fish’s

In the mornings, Edwin walks down the Sixteenth Street Mall to Larimer Street and lingers in the natural skin-care shop on the corner. Around ten, ten-thirty the shop is filled up: people drink protein

I am sitting near Perth Amboy, N.J. on the port quarter of the scow whose starboard side is swinging just free of one of the Colonial docks. The water is dung-coloured and slides away smoothly, horizontally before the eye. A tanker. Low brown and green countryside, low bridges. 

The village is celebrating I don’t know how many years of destruction. The band goes blaring by below my apartment. Among the crowd of youngsters following it I recognize someone who was tried about three weeks ago; he has a patch over his right eye and his cheek is pocked with barely healed scabs. 

Dawn in a forest. Pale light in the sky. Woods indistinct. Rustling of leaves, sound of soft, wooden whistles. On a sort of bluff or ledge of stone elevated above the rest there is seen a cloud of smoke drifting up into the sky or trees. 

That day I could not work because the sky was grey. The day before I had not worked because the sky was blue. I left the Public Library, where I was working at my history of the French Revolution (a work I could no longer do at home because the view from my apartment made me nervous), and decided to take a short walk on Fifth Avenue, uptown of course, because to walk downtown would have been fatal to my work.

In the photograph, my mouth is slightly open. I am talking to the man sitting next to me. The man is the writer, Alberto Moravia. Next to him, there is a woman. She is smiling at the camera, I can’t think of her

There is a cairn of shames, towered and teetering on his chest, that the slightest movement could lethally topple.

Goody Yates was a mess. He shambled along the side of the road, slump-shouldered and bleeding from the mouth, his head stuffed with cotton, pain and delirium duking it out in the pit of his mind. 

Once, I was asked to be on the organizing committee for the Buenos Aires Book Fair and to coordinate a roundtable discussion among writers.