The Pale Park and Other Writings

A man who spends his days inspecting binoculars begins to lose his sense of distance—and invents friends among the strangers he watches. In a garden, a contented daisy and a captive skylark meet the thoughtless kindness of a boy.

In A Snowy Landscape, a writer escaping his work paints the summer sea, only to be told that his picture looks like snow. His imagined blizzard gives way to an increasingly extravagant attempt to catch valuable carp.

The Pale Park moves between poetry, family quarrels, a moonlit Egyptian princess, and a fiercely contested card game. Its narrator continually interrupts himself, arguing with his readers about imagination, honesty, and the problem of ending a story.