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Men arrive like a date on a calendar they keep visiting once a month men who've seen the bottom of the deepest bottles kings of both earth and heaven and like the pearls from a torn necklace trembling I scatter at their touch their heartbeats open doors vessels respond to their voice commands and wind licks their faces like a crazy dog and gallops after their train and roams they undress me as if undressing themselves and hold me in their arms like a saxophone and oh this music these...

You who will murder me, wait. Look into my eyes before you begin—or end— It's the same for me. It might be that you reconsider. You, who are formed by remorse whose breath is the issue of accident, imbibing the world's desiccation, wait a moment! Now, this may be enough: to read the soft body tortured by your wrath, to look at the memories hidden in my eyes, the moon's stories. * * * You, who will murder me, I have hidden my identity in my eyes. My last wish is...

The house stood alone, facing the sea, a modest little cottage that was getting on in years, on a small dirt lane bordered by tamarisks twisted by winter winds. She had noticed the sign affixed to the front door as she walked slowly along, following the setting sun that was lighting up the sea. It seemed like a sign from destiny. At the pension Sorriso, the overly loud voices of the guests and the children's shrill cries shattered the quiet and made her temples pound: as the years go...

I go back to the "hole." I haven't stopped thinking about it since the first time I went there. I want to slip myself into that crack in the wall, find out what they do in there, how they spend their time, what they talk about, what a life of starvation and ugliness is made of, where they get the strength to go on hoping. The unconscious? The unwittingly religious or fatalistic acceptance of the life they've been given? The deferred gratification typical of dreamers?...

Chokora. Garbage. Now I know why they call them that. They are of the same color as the street, a noncolor, one that time, wear and tear leave on things like an indelible patina, a distilled filth, that amalgamates and stains hands, heads, shoes. They are walking rags. Their bodies are coated with layers of filth, they are lost, emaciated, rachitic, inside their shapeless jackets, beat-up overcoats, sweatshirts that the passage of days and months have totally faded into oneness with the...

I Let's slip into that last evening, the pharmacy where her pale restless face didn't register the greeting, the nightguard's: hungry face, I can't get past it, in the fog, the very face I once called love. We walk back to the glass. Then she tosses the timetable into a bin along with her eyeglasses, strips off her blue sweater, and hands it to me, lips sealed. "Why are you doing this?" "Because this is the way I am," she replies...

It was Bakarak himself who fired me. Bakarak, the Swiss doctor who directs the dietetics institute named after him. I'm standing here in the middle of the street and my thoughts climb up to the third floor, penetrate the window, and reach Bakarak's office, where at this moment-I'm certain of it-he sits before his computer terminal surfing through porno websites. Can one be an orderly with eighteen years' experience and develop a theory of diet? It wouldn't seem so,...

Nonna has always invented words, Mama does too, and so do I. Nonna invented nicknames and, by rebaptizing certain individuals, ennobled them in my eyes, making them into figures of distinction. Nonna has jumbled together the words of all the places she has known. They aren't worldly words-she never traveled much-but words of the Marches, and they were enough for her. More than enough, so that Mama too, and I as well, still feel her words on the tip of our tongues. They are words...

I am Napoleon. I am Marilyn Monroe. I'm the Pharaoh. Every morning I choose one of my costumes. I go out. Then I take up my position in front of the gates of the Piazza Duomo. If it's raining, I install myself under the gates. And there I stay. People pass and raise their eyebrows, they smile. One in a hundred tosses me a coin. So many people pass in the Piazza Duomo, I can't complain. Children come up close to touch me, they want to see if I'm a statue or a living...

You have to be away from Italy to see Italy. Or maybe just slightly displaced within its borders—on one of the islands, for example. I was in Favignana a few years ago, and late one afternoon, on an old rented bicycle, I came to a cliff behind the island's little cemetery. I sat up there, gazing at the distant coast of Sicily, until I lost any sense of time. Someone had told me—or maybe I had only imagined it—that what one saw from that point was the part of the...

"The sun also shines from here," his finger pointing to his heart his eyes rimmed with tears  

"The Rematch" offers a fictionalized account of the downfall of one of Argentina's most famous boxing champions, Carlos Monzón, El Flaco, the World Champion Middleweight Boxer from 1970 to 1977. Monzón defended his title in fourteen fights, defeating the North American boxers Bennie Briscoe and Emile Griffith, among others. In 1983 he strangled his wife and was sentenced to prison. He was killed in a car accident in 1995. When a publisher requested that Ana María...

“Harstad’s achingly lonely story artfully deepens a flat-screen modern world into a 3-D portrait of the empathy one stranger experiences on behalf of another, which becomes, in true transitive fashion, empathy flung back upon oneself.”—Heidi Julavits   I have been weighed and found wanting. It's nearly two o'clock, the last lesson of the day, and I am standing at the back of the diving board, right on its edge, and in front of me are the others, others...

In the beginning The spirit moving Upon the face of the waters And in the breaking waves Tasted salt And I see fields of it Drying on the shore. We let in shallow lakes of sea To evaporate, And the salt Accumulates along their edge Thanks to the sunlight: Crystal white, Enough for everyone, Harvested and sold In every shop and on the roads: Salt!— In proper measure Bringing out the taste, The flavor and spirit Of our food, hot or cold. Why should pepper get So much admiration...

I Insane asylum is a word much bigger than the dark vortex of dreams, yet it used to come once upon blue thread or a distant nightingale's song or your mouth opened, biting at the blue the fierce untruth of life. Or an invalid's ruthless hand slowly climbed your window syllabifying your name and when the foul number was finally loose you rediscovered all the seriousness of your life. II Affori, a distant town buried in filth, here you know beams and bolts and...

By the detergents and dish soap by the orderly books and broom on the floor, by the clean windows, by the table without papers, notebooks or pens, by the easy chairs without newspapers, whoever approaches my house will find a day that is completely Friday. That is how I find it when I go out into the streets and the cathedral has been taken over by the world of the living and in the supermarket June becomes a bottle of gin, sausages and dessert, fan of light in the kiosk...

I gave up on changing my clothes, and stayed in my dusty, wrinkled dark dress. I could barely find the time to change my tampon. Uncle Filippo, with his attentions and his angry outbursts, didn't leave me alone for a minute. When I said that I had to go to the Vossi sisters' shop to buy some underwear, he was bewildered, and remained silent for a few seconds. Then he offered to go with me to the bus. The day was airless, and getting darker, and the bus was crowded. Uncle Filippo...

What is the particular sadness felt by anyone who attempts, after years of absence from a region where he once lived for a long time, to stop and observe-without being seen or recognized-the ordinary unwinding of life? I am trying to understand this particular sadness, while contemplating the heap of gray and black houses of my native town from the top of this hill. I got off the train a little while ago and, not having any luggage, was able to leave the station quickly. Upon arrival,...

He knows that every published book is an imperfect representation of the book one imagined writing, its final shape determined by painful exclusions, second thoughts, and corrections that mercilessly cut out its best, most difficult parts; sometimes he thinks back on what his book could have been, or it would be more accurate to say the thousands and thousands of books he could have written which have remained hidden in a folder in his computer called "rejects," where these different...

There are also moments when we leave behind words of love and silences to talk about poetry. You rest your voice in the past and recall the title of a book, The story behind some verses, adolescent nights of the singer-songwriters, the importance that poets and protestors hold in your life. I speak to you of commas and case, of images that exceed or that lack, of the need to find the rhythm that will support the story, just as hands support the dampness and the walls of a...

"Kissed by Kylie!" proclaimed the T-shirt Marco was flaunting as he pushed through the revolving door of the mini-mart. A week earlier, at the Milanese concert of his number-one music idol in the world, while he had been waving his arms in front of the stage, the miracle occurred that he had been waiting for his entire life (God!—his entire life?—let's say, since the time of the release of "I Should Be So Lucky" ). Kylie Minogue, during the performance of "Your Disco Needs...

The evening heat was humid, heavy. Henri stopped for a moment to examine, one by one, the reproductions of photographs he had clipped from various sports newspapers and pinned on the walls, after going over them in color: brawls among soccer players, red lines against cerulean lines, mustached pugilists, rectangular fields crossed by a rugby ball's path. Henri often used photography to work on his paintings. For example, every detail of the grocer's family portrait, which was...

I was only nine at the time but I still remember the day we found out that the reservoir project was going ahead and that our house was going to be submerged by the waters. There was no turning back. All the appeals and official requests had been exhausted and we didn't have to wait until Father had come into the kitchen to know that the final decision was in favor of the reservoir. Outside it was raining and the plodding of Father's wet shoes down the corridor told us to get ready...

As her Polish husband Petro lies dead in the snow outside their home, Ukrainian Paraskevia thinks about their life together. In this extract she remembers the war, when the Soviet army occupied the eastern Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, where she and Petro lived, and deported many Poles to Siberia. Every seven years you should have a repeat wedding ceremony because-so Aunt Marynka used to say-every seven years you become a different person. So you should renew every sort of contract,...

Haven't you missed the sun and rain and streets? During those long nights, didn't you dream of these paths as you were eating ful and smoking? And how often did you torture yourself with thoughts of entering an old tavern? And dream of a man with vague features, your hand in his, your mouth open toward the sky welcoming the first showers of rain as the smell of clusters of jasmine and bitter orange blossoms linger everywhere. Dreams to which you bid farewell and welcomed back...