Two days before his show opened, Jack arrived at his hotel in New York to find a telegram from his grandmother. He was not alarmed. His grandmother believed telegrams were the most civilized form of communication. This telegram, like all of hers, was succinct. 

By the sheer size of its audience, the Asian epic Ramayana arguably ranks as the world’s most popular story. Its oldest version is a Sanskrit poem attributed to the poet Valmiki and composed some two millennia ago, though the legend it tells may be considerably older and is set, according to Hindu belief in the Second Age of the present cosmic cycle — hundreds of thousands of years in the past. 

Can you imagine how it might have turned out if Katherine Eudemie had forgotten her child in the coatroom of the Russian Rendezvous in March instead of a glorious, sunny June? Think of the women’s coats soggy with snow—the men’s trench coats soaked with wet —the little girl. Tulip, under a curse of endless sniffles. Impossible to think of raising a child in such an environment.

When the new shopkeeper arrived in the village he aroused great curiosity along with some scorn. He was deemed refined because his fingernails looked as if they had been varnished a tinted ivory. He had a horse, or as my father was quick to point out, a glorified pony, which he had brought from the Midlands, where he had previously worked. 

It was midsummer, the heat rippling above the macadam roads. Cicadas screaming out of the trees and the sky like pewter, glaring.

The days were the same day, like the shallow mud-brown river moving always in the same direction but so slow you couldn’t see it. 

A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping … A Cherokee filled with bourbon … A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student …

And a family from Marshalltown who head–onned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri …

Somehow, she found herself backed up against the artichoke display in the fruit and vegetable department at Waldbaum’s, feeling as lost and hopeless as an orphan. She was wearing her dun safari shorts

A long gap in the conversation followed and then he told his father about the tornado at school that day. They were out on the patio in back, facing the street that ran past. The father smoothed a long strand of hair over the barren part of his head and returned to the plate of macaroni and cheese in his lap.

He was one of those reporters. Never in a place long. Always going away, always coming back. Then he seemed to be around more. Then he was calling me up. I knew he did not have the most promising history with women. I knew that. I kept cool, he kept calling.

She walked her house by day, discovering it. She sat on the rough wooden staircase to the basement in order to look at the singing orange light of the gas water heater. She used a letter opener