Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The State of Mind: Thirty-Two Stories
He shoved his hands into his pockets because they'were cold. The smell of autumn was in his nostrils, the pleasant, acrid smell of smoke, and he knew that winter was not far 03. His throat began to ache, for the thought of winter' s closeness saddened him, since winter meant staying at home every night, sitting close to the kitchen stove trying to keep warm by the flames of a bucket of coal he would have scoured the tracks a mile or more to hnd, meant trying to read a book when his throat was choked by fear and waiting. There would be no Sound in the kitchen except the occasi0nal shuffle of coals falling ln the stove, but his mother would be working, patching a coat or a pair of pants that was nearly all patches already, and her grim silence would fill his ears with a more painful sound than any real sound he could' 1mag1ne.0r she would be ironing, and the clatter of the irons on the stove when she changed them would be like a gift as it broke luto the grim silence that clutched at him, like hands tightening on a throat to strangle it, like a weight bearing down and making him breathe hard with a kind of soft fear. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.