Challenging the Clouds
…is a book of a hundred stories of a hundred kinds, immersive and diverse.
A hundred images illustrate them, or else the stories describe the pictures.
Both at once.
That was poetic license… actually there are about 600 images and more than 125 stories, divided into seven volumes.
Diver 1, Variation 1 (Cover Image of Volume 1, 'The Avid Diver')
I Am Nothing
The guards did not speak to one another, either, and they held their submachine guns with both hands, at the ready, though pointing at the ground in front of them.
The wine merchant Edgar Isabey heard everything: the dying man's confession, punctuated by gasps and growls...
The Countess of Castiglione Loved Cold Climates
Every year, on one night, the night of the new moon following the spring equinox, they would open up the inner altar, and the little golden god was brought out...
The God of Skin was worshipped by males and females alike.
Was there blood? As she passed him, she looked up, more startled - and puzzled - than afraid.
...pale Eleanor, with black hair, thin, like a bird, and Golden Anna, my hippie madonna, with cheeks like a couple of roses.
It made no sense. His own life would now end...
Chaos Was the First Created Being
Diver 3 (Immersion)
Finding Tahiti at last too civilized, Gauguin determines to go even farther out.
The juggling competition took on a less casual mood, though not a hostile one, for all of that - at least not at first - when the stranger tossed an ivory-handled dagger into the cloud of objects passing between the two men.
Radio Londra
The press and the pundits wouldn't call him a demagogue, continued to treat everything as normal, as though his was just another item on the menu of democracy; they wouldn’t call him a con man, not even a reactionary populist, let alone - God forbid - a fascist… though those things were hardly hidden.
Helen Fleming Tells Her Story
A Kind of Revenge
Dottore Santini
...the memory of the most difficult part of the journey, the most confusing part, the most agonized and fearful: the way back to life after I had died.
Time Is a rock; and it is the wearing away of that same rock.
Diver 2, Variation 4
God, Nell, Ain’t It Grand?
