What will be the last book I read? Woolf’s finest work, the only one I shunned? The Turgenev novel everyone disdains? End Game in Poetry, a just-uncovered work by Grandmaster Borges, or Dinesen’s stories, seeking for a fourth time the mercy of my eyes? What will be in my hands the morning they find me? A dog-eared Borzoi, or sassy new Penguin? A pockmarked Pantheon, or pristine Random House? And will the failed-poet coroner claim foul play and confiscate the thing? Will the book then appear in a dealer’s locked case, scarred by marginalia claimed to be authentic, where I propose a brief tying-up-of-ends-type poem? Or will the last book be the one that I wrote and never could abide, but could read that night with kinder eyes, and whom I turned slowly to greet like a long-lost daughter? —Robert Richman, “The Last Book” Photography Credit Fay Yu