Dreamers Rise

A cronopio out for a drive spies a cardboard box at the side of the road marked FREE. He stops and investigates. Inside the box are some pot...

I'm standing on a great plain with no trees or buildings in sight, and I notice a faint hum of engine noise. I look up. Airplanes or air...

Jeopardy clue: "Inscribed on Woody Guthrie's guitar: 'This machine kills' these." Contestant's response: "Wh...

Jeopardy clue: "John & Priscilla Alden lie in the U.S.A.'s oldest maintained cemetery, which like a poem about the couple, is ...

In the office on the 73rd floor, high above the city, the president of the company passes me a handful of letters to mail and a note with t...

What's-his-name, in the role of the original sociopath. "His poltroonery is only surpassed by his invincible avarice" ( Macmi...

This is why you should always keep a decent set of maps in your glove compartment: you're driving along, just hoping to get home by dark...

My colleagues and I are seated around a picnic table at the edge of a farm field in the countryside. Below us, beneath some trees, is a smal...

In the spring and summer of 2007 I wrote a narrative entitled The Palace of the King of Night, described in its subtitle as "a novella...

The Spectator, 6 November 1852: Five publishers were yesterday summoned by Mr. Panizzi for the non-delivery of books at the British Museu...

Things that fit in the hand. Things that follow us, but only from a safe distance. Things that are closer than they appear in the rear-vi...

The following story engages the two central themes of Western Literature, which are, of course, the possibility (or impossibility) of true l...

All was quiet the next morning. There were a few heavy clouds along the horizon that he thought might portend a storm, but the next time he ...

At the beginning of the seventh week all communication with Z---- was broken off again, this time for three days. It resumed promptly and wi...

He was the last one left. Just before decamping the legionnaires loaded up the barrels of gunpowder that remained onto carts, piled on all t...

A man stands alone on a street corner — but to say he's alone isn't true, in fact he's surrounded by a swirl of pedestrians and ...

à Amittai Aviram As an autumn afternoon advanced, Arthur Asbury, an accomplished Assyriologist, ambled along an avenue, arriving at an Astur...

[Back to Part I] 11. I had begun cobbling together a story from raw materials that originally had nothing to do with each other. On the on...

1. A few nights ago I began reading a slender volume by Alberto Manguel entitled With Borges. In it, Manguel relates how, as a teenager wor...

Whatever things this notebook may be, at various times, and despite the title, it certainly is not a dream journal, an undertaking that wou...