The New Republic

When the two of us are old—me bald of course and you (it’s so unfair!) a distinguished gray— we’ll take a stroll the first suggestive day the yard shows signs of life, and I’ll commend the shape we both are in, and even you’ll admit we make a damn attractive pair for our age (we say in chorus), as we share the shade and shyly revel in what sun we dare expose ourselves to (“For an hour?” “No need to panic.” “Who panicked? All I said was ‘When both of us are old...’” “And then I said READ MORE >>

              Dear Mamma, the great-coat has come, whose use, and my gratitude for it, will surely cumulate                      all winter long, if        the cold has not caused me to need it until now.                However, all the last fortnight floods of rain have fallen—the farms all look like lagoons,                      and even College        has turned picturesque, a sort of moated fortress, READ MORE >>

I knew it had to come, but according to my plans, and to the arrangement of "usual arrangements," I'd be dead by that time. And I am: dead to the world in which I was so recognizably alive.   Of course I never guessed how it would come. (Guessing wasn't in the cards we held close to the chest.) Other people--everyone else--were the ones who had to guess. "Keep them guessing," Roy would say. He liked saying that.   And other people did guess. They guessed how it would come, luckily, I am dead, READ MORE >>

In the Land of Pain By Alphonse Daudet Edited and translated by Julian Barnes (Alfred A. Knopf, 87 pp, $13) READ MORE >>