Throughout the following week, since he had no laptop and no internet, he would stay up deep into the night, often holding vigil over Grazina’s volatile dreams, the pages of The Brothers Karamazov ringed with mold and falling apart in his hands. He would turn a page and it would break right off, the book […]

I, being I, went always that little bit too far of course. There was one master who had berated me in a lesson for some tautology or other. He, as what human being wouldn’t when confronted with a lippy verbal show-off like me, delighted in seizing on opportunities to put me down. He was not, […]

Later it would seem to Pearl that the Richardsons must have arranged themselves into a tableau for her enjoyment, for surely they could not always exist in this state of domestic perfection. There was Mrs. Richardson in the kitchen making cookies, of all things – something her own mother never did, though if Pearl begged […]