“The American notion of narration tends to see our story-line moving from East to West. To end a book with the protagonist standing at the Pacific’s edge is, for an American, to achieve narrative metaphor. Whether transcendence or collapse hardly matters - the edge is not just the end. It’s the ending.” — Patricia Hampl, in Sleeping By The Mississippi.

Photograph by Alec Soth: Venice, from Sleeping By The Mississippi.