After the Ball, 2002 | |
Afterword: Make Haste To Live, 1996When I was eight years old, in 1928, an incredible event occurred on the back wall outside the Academy motion picture theater in Waukegan, Illinois. An advertising broadside, some thirty feet long and twenty feet high, dramatized Black-stone the Magician in half a dozen miraculous poses: sawing a lady in half; tied to an Arabian cannon that exploded, taking him with it; dancing a live handkerchief in midair; causing a birdcage with a live canary to vanish between his fingers; causing an elephant to . . . well, you get the idea. I must have stood there for hours, frozen with awe. I knew then that someday I must become a magician. | |
Ahmed and the Oblivion Machines: A Fable, 1998 | |
All My Enemies Are Dead, 2003 | |
All on a Summer's Night, 1950 | |
All Summer in a Day, 1959"Ready ?" "Ready." "Now ?" "Soon." "Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it ?" "Look, look; see for yourself !" The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun. It rained. It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the school room of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives. Read comments (1) | |
Almost the End of the World, 1957Sighting Rock Junction, Arizona, at noon on 22 August 1961, Willy Bersinger let his miner's boot rest easy on the jalopy's' accelerator and talked quietly to his partner, Samuel Fitts. 'Yes, sir, Samuel, it's great hitting town. After a couple of months out at the mine, a juke-box looks like a stained-glass window to me. We need the town; without it, we might wake some morning and find ourselves all jerked beef and petrified rock. And then, of course, the town needs us, too.' 'How's that?' asked Samuel Fitts. | |
America (poem), 2006 | |
And So Died Riabouchinska, 1963 | |
And the Moon be Still as Bright (из "Марсианских хроник"), ? | |
And the Rock Cried Out, 1958 | |
And the Sailor, Home from the Sea, 1960 | |
And Then — The Silence, 1942 | |
And Watch the Fountains, 1944 | |
Another Fine Mess, 1995The sounds began in the middle of summer in the middle of the night. Bella Winters sat up in bed about three a.m. and listened and then lay back down. Ten minutes later she heard the sounds again, out in the night, down the hill. Bella Winters lived in a first-floor apartment on top of Vendome Heights, near Effie Street in Los Angeles, and had lived there now for only a few days, so it was all new to her, this old house on an old street with an old staircase, made of concrete, climbing steeply straight up from the low-lands below, one hundred and twenty steps, count them. And right now... | |
The Anthem Sprinters, 1963 | |
Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine, 1966 | |
Apple-core Baltimore, 2009 | |
The April Witch, 1952Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in blossoms, showering away in petals when the breeze blew. She perched in a limegreen frog, cool as mint by a shining pool. She trotted in a brambly dog and barked to hear echoes from the sides of distant barns. She lived in new April grasses, in sweet clear liquids rising from the musky earth. Read comments (3) | |
The Aqueduct, 1979 | |
Arrival and Departure, 2007 | |
At Midnight, in the Month of June, 1954 | |
At the End of the Ninth Year, 1995"Well," said Sheila, chewing on her breakfast toast and examining her complexion, distorted in the side of the coffee urn, "here it is the last day of the last month of the ninth year." Her husband, Thomas, glanced over the rampart of The Wall Street Journal saw nothing to fasten his regard, and sank back in place. "What?" "I said," said Sheila, "the ninth year's finished and you have a completely new wife. Or, to put it properly, the old wife's gone. So I don't think we're married anymore." Read comments (1) | |
Autumn Afternoon, 2002 |