story: Bullet in the Brain 

author: Tobias Wolff

year: 1995

where: a cozy wooden room, 600 meters high in the mountains

note: a favorite!

a line: “He did not remember Professor Josephs telling his class how Athenian prisoners in Sicily had been released if they could recite Aeschylus, and then reciting Aeschylus himself, right there, in the Greek.”