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How many minutes does it take a gut-shot buck to helter-skelter through scree and lose the hunter? How many days for turkey vultures to convert death into gliding? How many years till some schlub hiker like me stumbles upon the remains? There it lay— a tableau in bleached bone, flight and collapse converted into sleep.…

He will burrow and gallop, buffalo the prairie again, penguin the unhatched egg, then sleep off centuries of miracles with the three-toed sloth. What a magician, one minute pirouetting among banks of cumulus, the next grazing underground cafés with the star-nosed mole. Out of caves, from under bridges, a million translations of a single verb,…

At Poulnabrone Dolmen Argyle poured his soul’s ache into the hole of sorrows, huddling under the ancient capstone against the cold and crueler elements. Stone portal, stone cairn, stone everywhere— the rocky desert of the Burren bore a semblance to his own hard-weathered heart made barren by years of cast aspersions, pox, maledictions, cursed loneliness…

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012) When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012) The Man within My Head by Pico Iyer (Knopf, 2012) My Russian Grandmother and Her American Vacuum Cleaner: A Family Memoir by Meir Shalev (Schocken, 2011)  …

Argyle shat himself and, truth be told, but for the mess of it, the purging was no bad thing for the body corporal. Would that the soul were so thoroughly cleansed, by squatting and grunting supplications. Would that purgatories and damnations could be so quickly doused and recompensed, null and voided in the name of…

He is, I think, his own angel, or mine, not winged or gifted with a voice of annunciation— Blessed are you of all—or wielding a double-edged sword cleaving evil from the earth’s right angles, but rather a shuffle, stooped and soft-featured as the light from our campus lampposts, their globes a quiet amber behind beveled…

I’M DOING A CLEANSE,” Odin says. “Me and Mara. Just broth all day.” We’re standing at the corner of Grant and Polk by city hall in San Francisco, waiting for our ride to the Headlands where we will meet DT and do the vernal equinox ritual—“I know of a sacred tree,” he’d said, “at Rodeo…

hors d’oeuvres THE HASTILY ASSEMBLED spread on the dining-room table—Pringles, Wheat Thins, a bottle and a half of Merlot, four cans of Diet Dr. Pepper, a bowl of leftover Halloween candy—might be worse than no spread at all. This is one reason the hosts, Wendy and Drew Pike-Stuyvesant, are ashamed of and angry with each…

YOU SAY YOU’D LIKE a story for the ages, but you should know we live a little outside of time out here. Out here is the Nebraska panhandle, leveled as immaculately by wind and the spin of the planet as if it’d been planed by a master carpenter. As if the raw materials of the…

from The Book of Brothers 1. In the book of brothers, only one is chosen, only he walks with father, servants trailing them, to a place that will be known when it is known, only he is given to ask of father, when they arrive, the offering, where is it? (And where, while this defining…