I could hear a gaggle of Americans, couples, laughing, saying their loud goodbyes as they parted for their respective rooms: old college friends, jobs in the financial sector, five-plus years of corpo...
I can’t believe you two, Henry said crossly. I reminded you of this last night. But we forgot, said the twins, in simultaneous despair. How could you? Well, if you wake up intending to murder someone...
I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath. It lasted forever, like some weepy and endless made-for-TV movie—all the...
I am an alcoholic. I’m the first to admit that. I can’t drink at all. One drink is too many and a thousand’s not enough.
How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me?
Hobie’s reassuring hand on my shoulder, a strong, comforting pressure, like an anchor letting me know that everything was okay. I hadn’t felt a touch like that since my mother died—friendly, steadying...
Hobie had an iron constitution. Whenever he came down with something himself, he drank a Fernet-Branca and kept going.
Here is my experience. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you hav...
Her photographs, lining the hall outside my bedroom-- many different Pippas, at many different ages-- were a daily torment, always expected, always new; but though I tried to keep my eyes away always...
Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. And though it’s a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I’ve never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive i...
He was, like me, an only child. His father (born in Siberia, a Ukrainian national from Novoagansk) was in mining and exploration. Big important job—he travels the world. Boris’s mother—his father’s se...
Giovanna d’Arco aveva capeggiato un esercito quand’era poco più grande di Harriet, e nondimeno, il Natale scorso, suo padre le aveva regalato un offensivo gioco di società chiamato Cosa farò da grande...
Few years ago, we were up north in Canada, in Alberta, this one-street town off the Pouce Coupe River? Dark the whole time, October to March, and fuck-all to do except read and listen to CBC radio. Ha...
Esas imágenes que te llegan al corazón y lo abren como una flor, imágenes que se abren a una belleza tan grande que puedes pasarte toda la vida buscando sin encontrarla.
Era una quietud que yo conocía bien: así se encerraba en sí misma una casa cuando alguien moría.
El mundo no acudirá a mí, solía decir, yo tengo que salir a su encuentro.
Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this:...
Different cultures and all that, but it’s true what they say about the Japanese being undemonstrative.
De algún modo el presente se había contraído convirtiéndose en un lugar más pequeño y mucho menos interesante. Tal vez era eso lo que ocurría cuando la gente se hacía mayor.
Clearly ‘worry’ was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person.