I’m currently sitting on my parents couch in an undisclosed location in South Jersey. It’s 7am on Saturday, and I’m awake because my folks are both teachers and wake up, even on their days off and summer vacations, at painfully early hours. Since, when I come to their house, I opt to sleep on the couch in front of their flat screen TV and soak in the cable I don’t have in New York, they usually wake me up too. It’s worth it, I think, although I’m still a bit groggy. Now I don’t have to move much in order to turn on cartoons or Rocky IV, which I think I saw On Demand. But this place of rest also gives me a chance to continue reading a fun series from Harper Perennial called Fifty Two Stories, where those guys pair short works from great authors (Tolstoy, Cather, Melville, etc) with a piece from a lesser known contemporary acolyte of the form (our beloved Dennis Cooper has a story paired with Stephen Crane). I’m through Tolstoy and most of the Dostoyevsky, and I have to say that it’s a nice way to run through some iconic authors, most known to casual readers as writers of epically longer works, that I probably wouldn’t get around to any time soon. Hell, it’s worth $10 cover price just to see Fyodor’s dour, existentially pockmarked visage on the cover. Guy looks seriously bummed out about life. Someone get him a Dippin’ Dots.

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