Essay |
“Preservations”
“A lifelong binge drinker, he’d lost jobs, wrecked a car, punched holes in the wall of his house, but what had made my grandmother throw him out for good was stealing the three silver dollars my mother had won in an eighth grade essay writing contest.”
Essay |
On Reading The Postcard and Reclaiming Jewish Stories
“I spent hours reading immigration papers and marriage certificates, but I longed for the sort of sensory-rich details that Berest uncovered in her research …”
Essay |
“Bad News”
“He started walking west toward the Mississippi River which bordered the park, but he disappeared in the hazy darkness. The woman heard a splash. When she couldn’t locate him, she called the police.”
Essay |
“On Whales and Language”
“In order to communicate meaningfully with animals, we have to set aside the fantasy in which they become ‘just like’ us.”
Essay |
“Both Silence and Words”: Two Books, a Video, and a Surveillance File
“Carmen Bugan, a writer whose life has been marked by borders demarcating the speakable from the unspeakable, the thought from the crime, the self from the state, the I from the We.”
Essay |
“Pol Pot’s Secret Prison”
“… how, when they returned to their homes in early 1979, after the Khmer Rouge had been toppled, the villagers found their rice fields littered with mass graves and wells stuffed with corpses …”
Essay |
“Nightwalking”
“Sometimes it seems I spent my childhood walking at night, hiding in ditches, calming wandering dogs. Of course, that was only part of my childhood, the night half, the hidden half …”
Essay |
“On Portraiture”
“Maybe because survivors of the Holocaust, when I was growing up, left much of their interior lives unspoken — to hush up their own memories, to protect their children — I tried to teach myself to read emotions on the human face.”
Essay |
“The Way to Loreto — A Very Brief Poetics of the Fathomless”
“The Loreto-Principle states that it is impossible for a historiographer who sets out on a pilgrimage from Rome to Loreto to ever reach his destination. He will ineluctably get lost on the way.”
Essay |
“Irrigation Days”
“Mark caught his first wife cheating — there was even a detective involved, over from Fargo — and married his second wife right after the divorce. They were both named Tammy.”
Essay |
“Reading Chekhov in a Pandemic”
“Chekhov is the perfect writer for our current moment: aware and tolerant of life’s ingrained inertia, he pushes us to at least challenge it.”
Essay |
“‘A Giving of the Self’: on Thom Gunn and Courtliness”
“Looking over the span of Gunn’s writing, I get the sense of someone grounded in his own being, a self he inhabits with great confidence and apparent ease in large part because he is not especially concerned with himself.”
Essay |
“Echolocation”
“Just before a suicide there is – trust me — a split-second stripped of tormenting voices and mocking tunes and whatever injury or guilt, rage or despair led to this enormous silence.”
Essay |
“The Guitar Lesson”
“I am sixteen. I have recently been kissed by my guitar teacher, a man of nearly thirty years, but I have been numb to that and to everything else since my father’s brain embolism propelled him into the hospital a week and a half ago.”
Essay |
“Abiding Beauty” and “Battle of the Horns”
“When we were boys, we called it The Cabin, though by then it had things that on buying the place our grandfather had lacked: light, heat, plumbing, telephone – all the modern rest.”