If you've never been to an archive, this is what it's like: you will go mad from the hum of cranked up air-conditioning. You are usually only allowed to bring a pencil.
We take a cab to the outskirts of Bucharest to rent a car for the day. It is early spring, and my wife, Katie, will die in a few months, but this morning, I wonder how we might beat the weekend traffic.
The unpublished catalogue of fiction inspired by illness is limitless, composed every day, at every hour, in every hospital, clinic, hospice, and bedroom where the ill and injured and even the mildly indisposed attempt to make sense of our altered conditions.
Longevity is hard to create and sustain. The more you gain, the more you have to lose. It’s that tricky balance of not having too much want, or too much ambition, but still doing something meaningful with your time.
And that house right there? The one that sits exactly adjacent to field? Whose windows overlook the swings and the monkey bars and the kiddie pool and the slip-n-slide and the blackberry bushes? That is Jerry Sandusky’s house.
If Jonah Lehrer ever writes a book about irrationality, it would be hard to imagine a better case study than his own. Like the best of his stories, it’s surprising,…
"The short story is a dark form, don't you think? There are sunny ones but they're in the minority. I don't want complete darkness, though. I like a dappled story."
I saw myself, sitting away from the deck and the bottomless beers, listening to crickets and considering the loss of a body in metaphorical terms, drinking out of my own, grown-up Solo cup, me and my many-gendered grief.