Book of the Day Archive

“Gilly,” said Miss Ellis with a shake of her long blonde hair toward the passenger in the back seat. “I need to feel that you are willing to make some effort.”

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of night, he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping next to him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.

Oklahoma, 1922: That summer a water diviner named Michael Horse forecast a two week dry spell. Until then, Horse’s predictions were known to be reliable, and since it was a scorching hot summer, a good number of Indians moved their beds outdoors in hopes a chance breeze would pass over and provide relief from the hot nights.

I was supposed to play the piano. A piano is a beautiful instrument. Elegant. Dignified. People wear ball gowns and tuxedos to hear the piano.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you would expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

I wondered about you when you told me never to leave a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches out around the house because the mice might get into them and start a fire.

My name is Matt Pin, and her name, I remember, is Phang My. His name I will never say, though forever I carry his blood in my blood, forever his bones stretch in my bones.

Good thing the plane had seatbelts and we’d been strapped in tight before takeoff. Without them, that last jolt would have been enough to throw Vonetta into orbit and Fern across the aisle.

It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose. The whole land was very tense until we put our four steins on its corners and laid the river out to run for us through the mountains 150 miles north. Lewis’ hand took a pencil and marked out a small strong X in a place where some of the green bled away and the paper changed with high ground, and began to work downstream, northeast to southwest through the printed woods.

By 4:30 in the afternoon, the first mad rush of after-school passengers has come and gone. What’s left are stragglers and stay-laters, swiping their bus passes as they climb onto the 57 bus and taking seats among the coming-home workers, the shoppers and errand-doers, the other students from high schools and middle schools across the city.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

“I remember this little place next to the bus station that sold the best hot dogs I ever ate,” said Charlie Epps, who was a child in the 1940’s in Windsor, North Carolina.

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts.

It was a lovely funeral for Fluffy, the best pet I ever had. I was pleased by the turnout at the mansion.

Here we go again. We were all just standing in line waiting for breakfast when one of the caseworkers came in and tap tap tapped down the line. Uh oh, this meant bad news, either they’d found a foster home for somebody, or somebody was about to get paddled.

The remote village waits for a story to be told. News travels slowly in this corner of Kenya.

My name is Andrew Zansky. I’m fifteen years old, and I weigh 307 pounds.

It was a pleasure to burn.

Mama’s gone back to Phoenix tonight. She’s talking in her sleep, so I know exactly what the nightmare is about.

I remember falling. At least I think I do. Or maybe that’s just because I know I fell. The grass is far away–until it isn’t anymore. Somebody screams–wait, it’s me. 

“Are you comfortable, Reggie?” “Yep.” Reggie Shaw lies on a medical bed, his head inches from the mouth of a smooth white tube, an MRI machine. He’s comfortable, but nervous. He doesn’t love the idea of people peering into his brain.

I came into the world during the Tet Offensive, in the early days of the Year of the Monkey, when the long chains of firecrackers draped in front of houses exploded polyphonically along with the sound of machine guns.

“So you see…nature has always looked like a horrible mess. But as we go along we discover patterns and come up with theories. The result? The mess I’m gonna show you is smaller than the mess I would’ve had to show you ten years ago.”

You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.

Having just died, I shouldn’t be starting my afterlife with a chicken sandwich, no matter what, especially one served up by nuns.

There was an Indian head, the head of an Indian, the drawing of the head of a headdressed, long-haired Indian depicted, drawn by an unknown artist in 1939, broadcast until the late 1970s to American TVs everywhere after all the shows ran out. It’s called the Indian Head test pattern. If you left the TV on, you’d hear a tone of 440 hertz–the tone used to tune instruments–and you’d see that Indian, surrounded by circles that looked like sights through riflescopes. There was what looked like a bull’s eye in the middle of the screen, with numbers like coordinates.

We called him Old Yeller. The name had a sort of double meaning.

This book was born as I was hungry.