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He kissed her. She kissed him back. They kept their lips closed—Gwyn was a nice girl, from Minnesota, and Mark was almost ten years older than she—but she kissed him with such an intensity of kissing, such an abandon to it, that he began to think that maybe he could just do it all over again. Gwyn …

Mark laughed. He was not Mick Jagger either. Celeste was twenty-nine years old. In general, this was a pretty good age to be, a pretty happy age. But in Brooklyn in 2006, with every other weekend a wedding save-the-date from a college friend in her mailbox, it was less so. Celeste concentrated mome…

But he had to break up with Celeste; he began catechizing himself again the next day as he rode down Classon on his bike. Break up with Celeste, he said. You are both unhappy. You are not, it turns out, such a great couple. Misanthropes should not marry. At least not each other. And your failure to…

Mark was already at his building, and now he got off the phone. Would he really give her away? Really? The thought of them getting back together was blasphemy, it was socially taboo. You made a certain promise when you gathered all your friends and were married, and accepted their gifts, and congra…

Sidorovich was definitely not in Brussels in 1903; he may or may not have been in Petersburg in October; but he was, finally, at the Constituent Assembly in January. He had even produced a witticism on the subject. “The Constituent Assembly was like the opera,” said Sidorovich. “It was very boring …