I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Review,' 'The Sewanee Review,' 'Poetry,' 'Botteghe Oscure,' the 'Atlantic Monthly,' 'Harper's.'

Human life is too difficult for people.

The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.

I grew up in the prolonged survival of the great age of the horse, with harness and saddle and sleigh bells and horse pictures, not as antiques but the facts of our lives.

I had been warned about Jews by my gentile friends - they did terrible things with knives to boys.

You come to know the aches and vanities and tastes and intrigues of an entire neighborhood at a drug store.

Other families bought automobiles; we had a horse-headed hitching post in front of our house and drove horses.