A Midwesterner writes about the peculiar stillness of a region that does not get caught up in the excitement of the future — where proximity to family makes it impossible to forget that you will grow old and die.
Oates explores her childhood compulsion to enter abandoned farmhouses in upstate New York — meditating on what emptied spaces contain and what the imagination makes of lives that have left no other trace.
Bellow meditates on the photographs and images that have formed his inner life — and on memory, loss, and the strange power of the visual to outlast the people it depicts.
