Fiction

‘Is there anything you would not give me?’ she had once asked.

‘Nothing,’ he had said, instantly. ‘There is nothing.’

For some reason, she had kept looking at him, and had waited.

‘Well,’ he had said, clearing his throat. ‘Maybe the land. I wouldn’t want to give you the land.’

A student asked Donald Barthelme how he might become a better writer. Barthelme advised him to read through the whole history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics up through the modern-day thinkers. The student wondered how he could possibly do this. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping,” Barthelme said. “Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature.” Also art, he amended. Also politics.