Farrar Straus Giroux

JVlother Mouse was teaching her children about the world • • • But not all of them. One little mouse was not paying attention. She was curious about everything.

This is that story The heaving high seas were laden with scum The dull sky glowed redDust and ashes drifted in the wind circling the earth The burdened seas slanted this way, and that, flooding the scorched land under a daylight moon A black oily rain rained No one was thereAt the end, after the...

Büchner in the Desert Kant Catches Fire, as the novel was then titled, had left me ravaged. I could not forgive myself for burning the books. I believe I had got over my regrets about Kant (later Kien). He had been treated so cruelly while I was writing the book, I had gone to such lengths...

night falls suddenly in the tropics. The sun dives straight for the horizon, with none of the oblique angling of temperate climates. In the brief tropical twilight, darkness seems to materialize out of the very air, as if it leaked from the transparent nothingness between things; as if, Henry...

"May Carl and Madeleine take their nap at your house this afternoon? I have to prepare for the P^A^R'T^Y." .

Introduction I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I read The Joys ofL ove. It was 1978 and I was ten, curled up on the couch, listening to the tap-tapping of my grandmother's typewriter keys, and reading—no, devouring—her unpublished manuscript about summer theatre in the 1940s. My nine-year-old...