To have deep roots in a place means having dead buried there. It is almost that literal, the dead forming your bond to the earth and to the others whose dead lie buried there. I...

The scene sucker-punched Max. He never saw it coming. It encapsulated in one poignant instant the tragic beauty of his family history.

With the sensation that he was passing through the Looking-Glass, Max stared at his father as if he had never seen him before—simultaneously impressed and unnerved at the thought that, after all these years, he...

It was frustrating and exhausting to gather bits of disconnected information without understanding how it all fitted together.

I miss the days of burning your kind at the stake. For generations we have settled for financial ruin and ostracization of your whorish ancestors – but know this, I will personally gut you and...

There was something about the people you grew up around, the ones you’d seen throughout your childhood, the folks you couldn’t remember not knowing. Even if the past was a complicated mess, as you aged,...

At night, I think about these things. I’m pleased with what I know, but now I think much more about everything I could have known, which was so much more than anything I can learn...

You mustn’t throw them away. Let me have them.

Whatever it is that you think you have discovered. You must forget it.

Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not...