Thomas Wolfe’s first novel, titled O Lost, as submitted to the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins of Charles Scribner's Sons in 1928, contained 294,000 words.

Up and down the dull coastline of her desk, Amerylys ticked her fingernails, Minnie Mouse airbrushed onto each bismuth pink shield.

The subway train in Tokyo was as crammed as a cattlewagon. Crammed with organs, wrapped in meat, wrapped in clothes. Silent and sweaty.

As the army prepared to set out on its homeward march with my body, leaving behind only my blood gathered in a leaden vessel, I felt for a while that the world had fallen silent forever. 

The field is flattened like a book too long left open. There is the newly painted white crease of the spine, there the muddy dog-eared corner. The boys wait in their lines. The shouts are just beginning.

In 1917, my father's naval training completed he received his ensign's commission and shortly thereafter sailed as a signal officer on a troopship to Europe still in the wrong-colored uniform among deckloads of backpacking, leg-putteed doughboys.

“I know this is a morbid subject,” he says, “but your number’s gonna be up someday just like everybody else’s. You could be walking down the street, minding your own business and-Wham! Heart attack or truck, you’ll never know what hit you. It wouldn’t hurt to be prepared.”

“We are going to have a bad night of it,” said our Captain Fracken Cockernony, ciborium of parental chandlery and solecisms. “The Wind will most likely haul round, mutually supersaturating,

Finally, in the mid-sixties, after two of my colleagues at the institute tried and failed several times, I managed to bring the two elderly gentlemen together.

One of some two hundred stories by Anton Chekhov that were published originally in periodicals in Russia in the 1880s–1900s but unpublished in English.