By Night In Chile
Every now and then, Farewell burst into excessively sonorous laughter. At each of these guffaws, I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He looked like the god Pan, or Bacchus in his den, or some demented Spanish conquistador ensconced in a southern fort. The...
The Overstory
The things she catches Doug-firs doing, over the course of these years, fill her with joy. When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other underground, they fuse. Through those self-grafted knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and...
The Goldfinch
But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness,...
On Love
The telephone becomes an instrument of torture int he demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t ring. When Chloe called a few days later, I had rehearsed my speech too often to deliver it correctly. I was caught unprepared, handing socks on a rail. I ran to the...