I was in Stockholm recently.

Bright: How I’d describe the sky over Reykjavik at 11:36 pm.

I was sitting in the living room the other night trying to get through Middlemarch, the same thing I’ve been doing for most of this decade, and my ten-year-old son and his buddy kept interrupting to ask questions as part of this game they were playing.

Inside my head are sounds.

Lev has worried all afternoon that his niece and her husband won’t find his house.

He had them.

In September 2003, the descendants of John Marshall, the fourth and arguably greatest Chief Justice of the United States, gathered at the Richmond Marriott for a weekend of cocktails and lectures.

My sad heart slobbers on the deck, / My heart all smeared with navy plug

The bridge once passed

My friend, I could wander / Around out here for years

It is difficult to write an aubade, / a song about noon, or a few crepuscular lines

I was almost completed, but I could not blink.

Mesmerizing / & insistent as they might / be, even educated hands are / not thoughtful.

Dusk births a weird teeming.

I’m glum about your sportive flesh in the empire of blab, / And the latest guy running his trendy tongue like a tantalizing surge / Over your molars, how droll.

Open hangs his head and begins to mumble.

I had a dream I was killed in my sleep

The pool was covered by a sheath of leaves

Last weekend Sugu went back to Ipoh town.

Italy is a country awash in contradictions: short on nationhood, long on national heritage; Catholic in name and skeptical by nature; intensely proud yet eager to point out its own flaws; a place too puzzling for words that nonetheless elicits the unequivocal sigh, Only in Italy.

For starters, he would tell him that what he liked best about the new house was the view of the Unter den Linden, because it made him feel at home still.

One evening a few years ago in March, I drove from Bologna to Ferrara.

For the past few years, Antonio Scurati has engaged in a pointed, provocative controversy with what might be called the old guard of the Italian intelligentsia, which Scurati considers to be locked into useless, obsolete forms of political and cultural engagement. 

His eighth novel, Return to Baraule, opens in typical Niffoi fashion: a mysterious figure, Carmine Pullana, sickly, sixty years old, arrives in a backwater island village called Baraule.

The child opens her eyes and discovers it’s still dark out.

For a good many years last century I carried weapons.

Oh, the cold, cold water.