Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.
The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners,
The only mainstream American household I know well is the one I grew up in, and I can report that my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheeve...
The one thing everyone in the Republic had plenty of was time. Whatever you didn’t do today really could be put off until tomorrow.
The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.
The infinite variety of human badness.
That his comments actually pertained to her questions—that in spite of the infinity in his eyes he was participating in a finite conversation—made up for the sourness in his face.
Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will t...
Si uno dedica su existencia a gustar, y si adopta la imagen atractiva necesaria para ello, sea la que sea, se suele creer que uno ha desistido de ser querido por ser quien es en realidad. Y si uno con...
She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn't run away.
Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take he...
My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, altho...
Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history.
Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death:
La brezza fredda e il fumo della Camel si mescolavano come gioia e rimorso.
It's good to have friends in life. If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.
It was so easy to blame the mother. Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: why not blame the person who’d stuck you with a life? O...
It was clear to everyone that day, and in the months that followed, that Patty’s greatest warming influence was on Walter himself. Now, instead of speeding by his neighbors in his angry Prius, he stop...
In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went...
If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it.