If you walk through the green and chirpy tranquility of the park around the castle at Nizograd, Yugoslavia, past the Roman Baths, you will come upon a monument that might appear unseemly. Two 

The combis that, sending gusts of taped reggae and mbaqanga into the traffic, transport blacks back and forth between township and city, now carry a strange cargo of whites. The street committee

Stand up, please, place your hand here, state your name clearly. Frederick Charles St. John Vanderveld Montgomery. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

  When Boris Tomashevsky told his wife, Emily, about the afternoon he spent on Portobello Road, he neglected to mention the owls made of glass. First, he took off his coat and remarked what a lovely day it had been outside. It had been perfectly brisk, he said, the kind of day that does wonders for the heart. He asked her how her afternoon had been and told her of his own.

Of course I’ve heard of the Circus Trots. In May 1940, Comrade Pinardier (for that was his nom de guerre, not his name) found himself in Brussels, cut off by the German invasion. With his militant Trotskyist past, how could he get out from under the net? 

  Eleonora was an Umbrian girl whom the portiere’s wife had brought up to the Agostinis’ first-floor apartment after their two unhappy experiences with Italian maids, not long after they had arrived in Rome from Chicago.

In the late spring, at the end of a day that was marked by nothing in particular, something just under the surface of the ground changed. Some degree of warmth was reached, or some level of moisture. Something vague and ill-defined became essential and made its way like a signal along the lace of tree roots in the backyard. 

Mark Fusco sold his novel when he was twenty-two. “You’re a very fortunate young man,” Bill Winterton proclaimed. They met in the editor’s office, on the sixteenth floor. The walls were lined with photographs, book jackets, and caricatures. “You should be pleased with yourself.”

That day I could not work because the sky was grey. The day before I had not worked because the sky was blue. I left the Public Library, where I was working at my history of the French Revolution (a work I could no longer do at home because the view from my apartment made me nervous), and decided to take a short walk on Fifth Avenue, uptown of course, because to walk downtown would have been fatal to my work.

Let’s us celebrate small town beauticians.

All the women ones and some of them kind, particular and tasteful boys. Godsends, the entire curling bunch. Underpaid, they do more local good than many doctors I could name.