Case Study

Case Study

I continued to pass my evenings in the parlour, but I had grown impatient with the drivel I read. There seemed no reason why I could not do better, or at least have a stab at doing so. I began to write little sketches of the characters I encountered at work. Then for...
Three Ladies In The Morning

Three Ladies In The Morning

The midtown hotel restaurant was almost empty at eleven-thirty in the morning. Three waiters were talking in a corner, leaning against the wall. A young waitress was going from table to table and cleaning out the ashtrays with a wet rag. No one was seated at the...
Lanny

Lanny

At that time I was into finding and cleaning the skeletons of dead things. Mostly birds. I would pull them apart, coat them in gold leaf, reassemble them wrongly and suspend them from wire frames. Little mobiles of badly made birds. I’d done a dozen or so. The gallery...
Landmarks

Landmarks

I am wary of the dangers of fetishizing dialect and archaism – all that mollocking and sukebinding Stella Gibbons spoofed so brilliantly in Cold Comfort Farm (1932). Wary, too, of being seen to advocate a tyranny of the nominal – a taxonomic need to point and name,...
The Furious Passage of James Baldwin

The Furious Passage of James Baldwin

He was about ten, and puny for his age, when two Harlem patrolmen stopped him in an empty lot. Smug in their bias, snug in it, they amused themselves with speculation on his ancestry and probably sexual prowess while they frisked him. They him flat on his back....