Stories of the Street is a series of imaginative meditations—through prose poems, short-short essays, microfictions, and prose pieces without precise genre distinction—of what it means to encounter lost or discarded texts. By photographing on-location, David Lazar becomes a flaneur of paper debris, puzzling over the evidence of urban human life that litter represents.

David Lazar is the author or editor of numerous books, including Celeste Holm Syndrome (Nebraska, 2020); I’ll Be Your Mirror: Essays and Aphorisms (Nebraska, 2017); Truth in Nonfiction; Occasional Desire: Essays (Nebraska, 2013); and The Body of Brooklyn.

To the Reader

The Worry Anchor
Ghost List
(Boy) (Girl)
A Knife on a Fault Line
Air Quote
Apocryphal
Basement
Big Dog
But Seriously
Carly, Sorry
Chicago Hotel
Closing Time
Distaff
Face Down
A Supposed Examination of Entanglements
Two Times Six
Action Petition
Fireball
Forty-Eight Bucks
Have a Light, Janine?
Hermeneutics
Interval
It’s Late
Forgotten in Death
Troy’s Prophecy
Down by the Lake
Jane Burton
Why Do Some Objects Favor Us with Their Loss?
Je Suis V——, Napoleon
Jewish Museum
Wize Guise
Light Man
Love and Loss
Thrall
Love’s Lost Lake
Thus the Photograph
Malo Grablje
I Am Writing This in Chicago
On Wednesday, March 8th, at Six o’clock p.m. . . .
Mirror, Mirror
New World Order
Reading by Nina
Read, Goddess
Robin?
Scripting
Sequence
Sinatra Matters
What’s My Color IQ?
Succession
Temperature Could Be Rain
The Tigers, Baby
Telling a Story

Locations of Found Texts
Acknowledgments