Ron Sukenick
Stacey Levine

The later fictional pieces are sad. There's more than a tinge of regret, bafflement about what to do, where to cast one's gaze at the end of a life. Those familiar, short, blunt sentences are a little unbearable in this context. 

    A long time ago, he wrote in an essay, "What I can't live with is the lie that literature descends from Parnassus, blue-eyed and innocent." In such a manner, he steered a lot of people to the right stuff, which is to say the dark stuff, which is to say he was a good educator, which sounds very strange. But he was. Instead of money-to-medical-investigations or flowers or what-have-you, Ron asked for donations to be sent to the American Book Review or FCII, a plainspoken request that points from Ron's final experiences directly back to writing itself-and this couldn't feel more right.