I. Skin My friend Nina archives and restores old films. Their bodies accumulate everything from dust to mold to dirt, shrink and become brittle, crack or start to break apart. They’re decaying from …

When I was being born, the doctor had to fold me in half to get me out. It was 12:58 a.m., my mother’s pelvis was too narrow, I was too anxious to be delivered. The doctor broke my clavicle, made …

       In the final chapter of his Greenwich Village memoir  Kafka Was The Rage , Anatole Broyard describes the aching, joyous condition of sex in the years immediately following the Second …

        Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.                                         —Michel de Montaigne         All, …

       Within a thick fur of trees, a single sharp black dart punctures the gray sky. A hollow shot sounds throughout fields and mountains, echoes as if from an oil drum’s bottom. A minute dot …