From Little Fires Everywhere:

Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. All spring the gossip had been about little Mirabelle McCullough—or, depending which side you were on, May Ling Chow—and now, at last, there was something new and sensational to discuss. A little after noon on that Saturday in May, the shoppers pushing their grocery carts in Heinen’s heard the fire engines wail to life and careen away, toward the duck pond. By a quarter after twelve there were four of them parked in a haphazard red line along Parkland Drive, where all six bedrooms of the Richardson house were ablaze, and everyone within a half mile could see the smoke rising over the trees like a dense black thundercloud. Later people would say that the signs had been there all along: that Izzy was a little lunatic, that there had always been something off about the Richardson family, that as soon as they heard the sirens that morning they knew something terrible had happened. By then, of course, Izzy would be long gone, leaving no one to defend her, and people could—and did—say whatever they liked. At the moment the fire trucks arrived, though, and for quite a while afterward, no one knew what was happening. Neighbors clustered as close to the makeshift barrier—a police cruiser, parked crosswise a few hundred yards away—as they could and watched the firefighters unreel their hoses with the grim faces of men who recognized a hopeless cause. Across the street, the geese at the pond ducked their heads underwater for weeds, wholly unruffled by the commotion.

♣

From The Magician of Vienna:

THE MIMETIC APE. Reading Alfonso Reyes revealed to me, at the appropriate time, an exercise recommended by one of his literary idols, Robert Louis Stevenson, in his Letter to a Young Gentlemen Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art, consisting of an imitation exercise. He himself had practiced it, and with success, during his period of apprenticeship. The Scottish author compared his method to the imitative aptitude of monkeys. The future writer should transform himself into an ape with a high capacity for imitation, should read his preferred authors with an attention closer to tenacity than delight, more in tune with the activity of the detective than the pleasure of the aesthete; he should learn by which means to achieve certain results, to detect the efficacy of some formal processes, study the handling of narrative time, of tone, the organization of details in order to apply those devices later to his own writing; a novel, let us say, with a plot similar to that of the chosen author, with comparable characters and situations, where the only liberty allowed would be the employment of his own language: his, that of his family and friends, perhaps his region’s; “the great school of training and imitation,” added Reyes, “of which the truly original Lope de Vega speaks in La Dorotea:

How do you compose? I read,
and what I read, I imitate,
and what I imitate, I write,
and what I write, blot out,
and then I sift the blottings-out.”

An indispensable education, provided the budding writer knows to jump from the train at the right moment, untie whatever tethers him to the chosen style as a starting point, and knows intuitively the right moment at which to embrace everything that writing requires. By then he must know that language is the decisive factor, and that his destiny will depend on his command of it. When all is said and done, it will be style—that emanation of language and of instinct—that will create and control the plot.

♦

From The Pride of the Yankees: 

The Pride of the Yankees—the story of a simple, sensitive, brilliant, and honest athlete—was the first great sports film. A big-budget movie in 1942, the first full year of America’s involvement in World War II, it brought us Gary Cooper as Gehrig: a near-perfect marriage of a modest, heroic subject and an actor who specialized in modest, heroic characters. Pride helped define Cooper’s career, but more crucially, his performance is critical to defining Gehrig’s legacy as a man of integrity who somehow tells a stadium full of fans that he is “the luckiest man on the face of the earth” despite having a disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), that had just ended his career and would end his life two years later.

Seventy-five years have not diminished Pride‘s powerful evocation of a man struck down in his mid-thirties, who was loved deeply by an intimidating immigrant mother; his adoring wife, Eleanor; his teammate Bill Dickey; and his manager, Joe McCarthy. He was an ordinary man who did extraordinary things in ballparks until ALS stopped him.

Pride would only hint at the seriousness of the disease, but its telling intimations of his mortality (a sudden stabbing pain in his shoulder; the loss of dexterity that rendered him unable to tie his bow tie) suggest the terrible reality.

As his life ebbed, Lou Gehrig needed friends to distract him, to cheer him up, to let him talk about anything but amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. One of the regulars was John Kieran, a friend and sports columnist for the New York Times. Kieran maintained a positive tone during visits to Lou at his house in Riverdale, in the Bronx, in mid-March 1939, ignoring the clear signs of Lou’s decline—his weight loss, his faltering voice, his inability to move from his chair on his own—in his columns.

So Kieran relied on what Lou wanted to discuss. Baseball, football, and swimming. Facing Grover Cleveland Alexander in the 1928 World Series. The Yankees’ plan to move second baseman Joe Gordon to first base.