"The poetry of air bombing requires a particular imaginative sympathy absent from other war poetry, and it must play between telling and deferring the tale: between the poet who survived and the others who died that night," he writes.
Yet his own Catholic nostalgia lingers in a conviction that "The Canterbury Tales" "moves between piety and farce".
Historical drinks have been commemorated — and, no doubt, imbibed — along with ghost stories, stories of heroism and plenty of tall tales in between.
But there are also several Christmas tales sandwiched between the American classics, and it is here that Irving succeeded in propelling the celebration of Christmas beyond the relatively modest Dutch model.
These humorous tales, published between 1953 and 1995, feature dizzying flights of fancy and whammo endings, taking on subjects as varied as psychiatrists, Hollywood, cocaine, guilt, sex and Jewish mothers.
Though Luigi Pirandello's name is synonymous with the breaking of theatrical boundaries, much of his work is narrative, including the fifteen-volume set "Short Stories for a Year," comprising more than two hundred tales, published between 1922 and 1937.
Scholars of fairy tales distinguish between genuine folk tales and literary fairy tales; the first are customarily anonymous and undatable, the latter signed and dated, but the history of the stories' transmission shows inextricable and fruitful entanglement.
Collected below are a few tales from between the sheets, stories of the first times from those who have chosen to take the plunge, and jumped in with both feet.
His on-stage tales alternate between hilarious and difficult moments: managing his diabetes, raising a teenage stepson, getting drunk with his friend Martin and reuniting with his father, who left his family when he was a child.
