But a partial return, to Manhattan rather than Brooklyn and to the present (a sort of present), rather than the seventies and eighties.
Though suicide itself was painful to contemplate, it became — to echo the title of another of David's stories — a sort of present to himself.
His last book of stories was called "Oblivion," and an earlier collection included the stories "Death Is Not the End," "Suicide as a Sort of Present" and "The Depressed Person".
And the form reinforces the back-and-forth movement of time; the scene is written in the past tense, but Franzen intersperses present-tense verbs — "Walter asking," "Patty saying" — that condense things, creating a sort-of present-past, which is another way of saying that he creates the conditions for nostalgia in the reader.
I think, in fact, that I was promoted from receptionist to secretary as a sort of engagement present.
I was just hoping that some athletes would take the opportunity given to them – a sort of a present, like, 'Here, use it'.
One year, as a sort of joke present from a secret Santa, I got a hands-free mobile phone kit that was just a really thick rubber band.
Apparently, and understandably, it can sometimes wear on the dancers, keeping the loss of their choreographer in a sort of eternal present tense.
Most young men and women at the century's end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.
This approach makes, at times, for a curiously opaque narrative, but it also intensifies the immediacy of Ms. Sonnenberg's story, plunging readers into a sort of perpetual present tense in which we are made to experience, almost firsthand, the inexplicable and perverse behavior of an impossible woman from the point of view of her aghast, bedazzled — and immensely gifted — daughter.
He spent one night on the pool table in the basement of the house of our friend Hinkley, and while we were at school the next day he shoplifted a billiard-room talc dispenser from Sears and screwed it to the frame of a door near the cue rack, as a sort of house present.
