I love to hear that another memoir has been exposed as a big phony.

You are never happier than when you’re in transit.

The neighborhood where I grew up and where my parents still live is one of the apartment compounds built in the 1950s in Beijing.

When the prices of everything went up ninety-seven times in one year, M’dhara Vitalis Mukaro came out of retirement to make the coffins in which we buried our dead.

The train carrying Neville back to Hampshire was formed of ten coaches and was scheduled to divide at Eastleigh, where the front five carriages would proceed to Poole, while the rear five branched off toward the New Forest.

In the early 1980s, faced with rapidly dwindling shelf space in their seven tiers of stacks, the New York Public Library at Forty-Second Street—the one with the lions—prevailed upon the city to fund the construction of a gargantuan book storage annex thirty feet under the grass and London plane trees of Bryant Park.

A woman of the citizen party—what’s that— / is writing history backward / her body the chair she sits in / to be abandoned repossessed

I do not acknowledge it, though it is mine.

I had not felt so / tired so early in the day / since last winter

The time and place and manner of my death are three facts that / don’t exist yet.

On the typographic bushes of the poem down a road leading neither out of things nor to the mind, certain fruits are composed of an agglomeration of spheres plumped with a drop of ink.

The bird is a little machine for forgetting / The freight trains that pass my house

The earth’s humus is made fertile / through the worm’s anus.

It was as if they’d stepped into the head / of a wind god, / and gotten trapped there and, / within captivity, made a space they could / sometimes recognize.

There is a way in which / I can be distracted / from what matters.

Blackbirds, then other voices.

Nothing here, just the sound of the heat, the sound of the cars, / nothing, nothing

though I may not recognize the places I have / seen it, it is still an ornament, an ornament / known well; I know its name, I traced / those lines, and feel easy now about it.

The other side of the mountain / collects / and even cultivates / its mystery

On the last evening on this earth, we sever our days / from our trees, and count the ribs we will carry along / and the ribs we will leave behind

In 1963, an eleven-year-old boy named Peter Harville was committed to a state mental hospital in the western part of Massachusetts, far from the island where he grew up.

It is the afternoon of August 26, 1785, and Jean-Honoré-Robert de Paul, chevalier de Lamanon, has just returned to the Boussole, exhilarated and exhausted after a successful ascent of the Peak of Tenerife.

On Atsushi Nakajima's masterpiece.

In the ninth lunar month of Tianhan 2 (99 B.C.E.), during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, Commander of the Cavalry Li Ling led a force of five thousand foot soldiers north from the border fort of Zheluzhang.

Denis Donoghue discusses the law of dreams