Late May, 1754: George Washington watches as one of his confederates, the Iroquois warrior Half-King, reaches down to the corpse of a freshly slain French ensign,
In post-9/11 America there has come to be what I think of as the Ministry of False Alarms. The Ministry of False Alarms constantly raises the level of fear inside the United States. I’m not sure what these various rainbow-colored alerts are...
I stood with Bella in the sunny piazza in Livorno, one noon in May. My wife had gone to buy French francs; the era of the euro had not yet arrived. I noted to the collie that this was a city full of pretty girls … but what were we getting...
Brioche. Barouche. And one of them you can still buy, by the dozen, at the sweets stall in the weekend farmers market; the other hasn’t been seen in a century (although they tend to blend, to be conjoined twins, in my mind).
Everyone around the world with access to a television set saw the cataclysmic destruction of the World Trade Center towers, saw it in constant replay, burning—and burning itself into our collective retina. I saw it that way too, but first...
No preliminary explanation, no introduction to prepare us for this clearly fictional statement, couched in the third-person present tense familiar from The Master of Petersburg (his most recent novel at the time), and for those of us who...
