Edgar Doctorow - All the Time in the World

The night darkens, and the constellated stars seem to be greeting me. In a surge of joy that flows from my heart I lift my arms and greet the heavens. Welcome, sweet springtime!

My hand brushes against something.

This is the sky. I am touching the sky. I feel it with the tips of my fingers. It is hard, metallic, with the texture of the tiniest of nubs, little dots, like Braille, some of them aglimmer. But then they begin to soften and melt away. Or is it my hand that is melting away?

And I think, for a moment, that I have felt a reverberant hum, as of some distant engine.

The stories that appear in this work were originally published in the following periodicals and books, sometimes in different form:

“Wakefield,” “Edgemont Drive,” and “Assimilation” first appeared in The New Yorker .

“Heist” was published in The New Yorker and later adapted for the novel City of God .

“All the Time in the World” was published in The Kenyon Review .

An earlier version of “Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate” appeared in The New American Review .

“Walter John Harmon,” “A House on the Plains,” and “Jolene: A Life,” first published in The New Yorker , were subsequently included in the book Sweet Land Stories .

“The Writer in the Family,” originally published in Esquire; “Willi,” originally published in The Atlantic; and “The Hunter” were all included in the book Lives of the Poets .

E. L. DOCTOROW’S works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair , and The Waterworks . Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize, honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction.