How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

Each night, after dinner, my father went downstairs to his workbench to build birdhouses, which he fashioned from scraps of wood left over from pine-paneling our basement. He was a connoisseur of birdhouses, my mother said.

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Those are the first sentences of Mother of Sorrows. It's a string of pearls, that book. Read it, and tell Richard McCann how much you love it.

The Swedish word for the day is hjärtat. It means the heart.

- by Francis S.