The First Sentence Of A Book Is

It's Easy To Set A Story Anywhere If You Get A Good Guidebook And Get Some Basic Street Names, And Some Descriptions, But, For Me, Yes, I Am Indebted To My Travels To India For Several Of The Stories.

One Hand, Five Homes. A Lifetime In A Fist.

Gogol Is Unaccustomed To This Sort Of Talk At Mealtimes, To The Indulgent Ritual Of The Lingering Meal, And The Pleasant Aftermath Of Bottles And Crumbs And Empty Glasses That Clutter The Table.

Gogol Remembers Having To Do The Same Thing When He Was Younger, When His Grandparents Died...he Remembers, Back Then, Being Bored By It, Annoyed At Having To Observe A Ritual No One Else He Knew Followed, In Honor Of People He Had Seen Only A Few Times In His Life...now, Sitting Together At The Kitchen Table At Six-thirty Every Evening, His Father's Chair Empty, This Meatless Meal Is The Only Thing That Seems To Make Sense.

In Fiction, Plenty Do The Job Of Conveying Information, Rousing Suspense, Painting Characters, Enabling Them To Speak. But Only Certain Sentences Breathe And Shift About, Like Live Matter In Soil.