In the winter of 1972, our entire family went to Rome with a client named Basil so my father could take care of a small legal task for him. Basil was a marijuana dealer, and my father was a criminal-defense attorney, but the legal matter was commercial and took only a few days. Then we drove around the country looking at artistic treasures, which my mother believed essential to our development. 

I awoke early in my apartment and rested quietly for an hour. Then I phoned my office to say that I would be in. Lucky, my secretary, was pleased, and said that she was thinking of getting married. 

The village of Damariscotta Mills looked as though it had been scrubbed and polished, so bright was the light, so transparent the air, on the July afternoon when a taxi left us at a white clapboard house with green shutters, the home of Jean Stafford and Robert Lowell. Though we were not late, Cal (as he was called) greeted us as if he had been impatient for our arrival. 

I was almost fifteen. I was working at my first real job at a place called the Spudnut Shop, a doughnut store, in Union Gap, Washington, June of 1955. This very good looking young man walked in with

I don’t know what had roused cummings’s ire; he was fairly well represented in Untermeyer’s anthologies.

There was a Rembrandt drawing of a lion above Sabina’s bed. When Francesca sleeps there, the lion looks down on Rose White and Briar Rose Slumbering, or some such scene by Burne-Jones. By day the Rembrandt lion

La Consula was a big white house with Doric columns along the front. It sat in a park on the road between Churriana and Alhaurin de la Torre, near the Malaga airport

Terry Southern’s interview with the English novelist Henry Green (born Henry Yorke) has been an in-house favorite atThe Paris Review ever since it appeared in our nineteenth issue (Summer 1958). If Green was, in Southern’s borrowed description, a “writer’s writer’s writer,” theirs is an interviewer’s interview

As we stroked Terry’s forehead and held his hand, he would casually remove the mask as if about to shave or sleep. Before his oxygenation level fell below 69, I would gently hold the mask before his nose, careful not to let it chafe and crimp him.

“You’ve got to keep the mask on,” my mother Carol said, “it’s what’s keeping you alive.”