Ulf Wolf: 53 books

Five-Stars: "Ulf Wolf has created a magical tale that crosses continents and cultures, seamlessly weaving Scandinavian and Indian folklore and establishing an underlying message of universal connectedness. It is an engaging story of relationships: a son's to a mother, an actress' to the world,...

The warm March sun had shone all day. Although the air remained frigid in the many shadows, out in the open the surface snow was now melting in its glare. Then, as commonly happens in early spring this far north, when the sun began to set and the shadows to grow longer across the snowy field, the...

Before the beginning of time there was no such thing as surprise. By the way, by the “beginning of time,” I mean the beginning of this time, the one that we’re now busy living and dying and doing things in, the one we’re currently complaining about. There may well have been other times,...

He sleeps in a small grass hut. Its floor is smooth ground, is hard dry mud trod and trod again by feet coming, going, coming, going, and sometimes staying. The hut contains nothing but empty space and a yellow and green mat of woven grass, still fresh and with a scent of field, serving as...

It is a painting of a Yeats poem, a canvas of a dark night where, in a star-lit glade, he wishes for the cloth of Heaven. And yes, this cloth are many stars. She, watching the painting, can see them spread before her, but she of the picture does not see these stars and she treads on the starry...

This never happens to plumbers. The plumber’s world makes sense. It’s all about water and gravity and slanting pipes. You channel the water in, you channel it back out. You slant the pipes earthward a little. Not much, just enough for the water to head in the right direction. Gravity does...

Sussex nights in early July do not stay dark for long, and by four o’clock gray creeps up on you from under bushes and from behind walls and soon you can easily make out shapes and features again. Half an hour later, it’s as good as day. We had stayed up talking right on through the night...

July 6, 1961 What I dislike the most about electric shock is the smell. That, and the little sound it makes which I didn’t hear at first. What with the humming of the machine, the doctors talking, and the patient moaning and even screaming sometimes, it was hard to hear, but once I did, once...

The new blade, one of a sharp twin pair, slices skin and lets blood out. There’s hardly even a sting at first, before the foamy shaving cream turns pink, then red, and here’s the sting, for real now, as if let loose by blood. Foam redder still. It’s a pretty deep cut. “Damn.” His...

The day before his execution, I saw my dad for the next to last time. I had never seen him this thin, nor this unshaven. In fact, I can’t for the life of me ever remember him unshaven. Yet, here in his cell, with only a day to go—less than a day, now, more like twenty hours (not even that)...

The finer strands sway in the warm, dusky air, perceptible only to the dying. No, perhaps not strands; they are more like the long, dark gossamer tendrils of a celestial man-of-war descending through ether, through the high, indiscernible stone ceiling, through scream-filled air, there to melt into...

Harry felt fractional: part man, part air. His flesh-and-bone part was squashed to four feet three inches by a fate and gravity too cruel to forgive, and the remaining two feet—he saw himself, his real self, as six foot three, not an inch shorter—see-through dream. Just his luck...

She eased the door shut behind her. Even so, pulling it closed slowly by inches, the hinges squeaked a little and on settling the latch bolt clicked loudly into place, like a soft gunshot. At least to her ears. She stood there for a moment, very still, her ear to the cold, blue plywood door...

There are as many Gods in this universe as there are beings. And the game we play is called “Touch.” It’s a form of spiritual hugging. Easy to begin, pretty much impossible to bring to a close. How it came about: Before the beginning of the universe, before there even was a universe,...