A small room above a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

Beside the bed, a gooseneck lamp with beige cone shade. Below that, a seaberry Ricola and a roll of toilet paper. Underneath the toilet paper is a collection of Irwin Shaw stories, Mixed Company, a Jonathan Cape edition from 1966.

"Main Currents of American Thought" (1939) is a strange story about a freelance writer. Reading it against Shaw's later book, Rich Man, Poor Man (1969), is like having read Lydia Davis and being told that she also writes under the name "Alice Munro".