September, with a paintbrush, on Monadnock.
October, in the backyard, with a silencer.
November, on a windowpane, with a skate blade.

Some six hundred years ago, a cypress tree fell—perhaps soundlessly—in central California. When the artist Charles Ray fell for it, circa 1996, he didn’t carve his initials into its bark; he made sure his love would endure. Ray had the tree’…

The final entry in our three-part series on writers’ epitaphs. Read yesterday’s installment here, and Monday’s here.The poet and memoirist Primo Levi was buried in Turin in 1987. According to a notice printed in the New York Times shortly after his f…

The second in a three-part series on writers’ epitaphs. Read yesterday’s installment here.There is very little that’s puzzling about Philip Larkin’s two-penny upright “This Be the Verse” (1971): They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
T…

The first in a three-part series on writers’ epitaphs.“In lapidary inscriptions, a man is not upon oath.” —Samuel Johnson Got a brittle, expensive medium? Bring an elastic ethics. Dr. Johnson understood that words on headstones provide …