selected writing
Tonopah
There is a road through the desert. It doesn’t snake or bend. In the day it shimmers and at night it is dark. It is both alike and unlike other roads in other deserts. The road is a particular road to an imaginary place.
All places in the desert are imaginary.
Fumarole
For a moment, I thought it beautiful, as if I could see on its surface reflected in miniature the shadows racing down the volcanos, the valleys all gone orange and brilliant.
A Year in Reading
I confess to having a reticent memory. I keep few records. I should be more organized. Twenty-twenty-two was a year of reading—haven’t they all been? as well as I can recall—and yet I’m not sure it was a year of overmuch finishing. The year began in an overheated apartment in Manhattan. It could’ve been storming. Maybe lightning struck the tall building that everyone knows, everyone sees, the most witnessed building in history, perhaps, but whose name I here elide.
A Story About How Stories Are Composed
by Boris Pilnyak, co-translated from the Russian with Emily Laskin
Then and there in Mayu-san I thought about how stories are composed, and that it is very difficult to kill a person, but even more difficult to pass through death, as human biology predicted. Yes: how are stories composed?—
A Little Lucky in the Evening
And here comes Lucky, lucky as he ever was which is to say not so much, listening to the fleshy thwack and the wet sucking of the floodwaters receding. He doesn't smoke anymore. He takes his coffee in cup and saucer. He has a sensible bedtime and he puts in the hours.
No one ever said reading Tolstoy wasn’t without its dangers. A bee stung me as I read outside and, without thinking, I flung the book. Somehow appropriate to begin Volume II with scars.
Lost in an Infinite Twilight:
Mathias Énard’s ‘Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants’
Even as the tragedies of history are spoken, the listeners are asleep. And yet, Énard remains optimistic, his novels a powerful reminder that the possibility for connection remains.
Yosemite in the Fifties
The American Alpine Journal
For these wild explorers, such objects were both cutting edge and normal, their everyday companions. For us, they’re out of this world.