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“Right. I just can’t get over how programmed it all feels. It’s like right now”—Sam looked at his watch, it was almost midnight, any minute now Katie would announce that she had an early flight; he needed to suggest that they go home, but he couldn’t figure out how!—“all across America, diligent me…

It took balls to do what he did because if he failed—and he had failed—he’d end up where he was. He hadn’t accomplished the things of which he’d dreamed, and now he couldn’t even get done the very basic things that most adults did—like pay his bills, for example (a most unpleasant form letter—and p…

No, no, that wasn’t it, exactly. It was more as if life, the life he’d known, had begun to seem so slippery to him. Who could say what had happened and what it had meant? There’d been so much drinking! He had been close to people—but not quite close enough; and he had given himself to people, but n…

In 1936 Gorky died. “No one will protect me now,” Babel told his wife. Three years later, he was arrested, interrogated, tortured, and shot. He was forty years old.

I still remember—how well I remember—looking out the window of that train. We were blazing down the final stretch of rail before Ba…

I nodded gratefully, and that was that. In between sips of coffee Morris had concluded that I was a mediocrity—or a genius. I happened to know already that I was neither—that if I applied myself, I’d be fine, more than fine, and if I didn’t, I would probably fall through the cracks. I knew that. Wh…