Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section.
I am shaking it, popping it, laying it down and working it out
Yes, it is. I’m leaving the marriage, I’m not leaving you. As long as you’re in the house, I’ll take care of the house. Fuck off, said Sylvia.
Whatev was the first hand sign I learned at college, but there were several popular then. There was the thumb-and-index-finger L held against the forehead, which meant Loser. The whatev W could be fli...
One Mother’s Day, he gave Mom a music box that played the theme from Swan Lake. She cried for days over it.
Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.
It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is the thing that makes us unique--our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language--some other species comes along to snatch it awa...
I often felt wild back then; I enjoyed the feeling, but nothing had ever come of it.
He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ears. Open the doors and the clowns pile out.
A quote hung on the opposite wall: Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it.
Years later, my father made a passing reference to the uncanny-valley response—the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people. The uncanny-valley response is a hard thing to d...
The world runs, Lowell said, on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, becaus...
I've often been accused of harnessing genre strategies to mainstream ends. I do concede that relationships, characters, and introspection are my primary interest. The fanciful is of a secondary order...
He didn't believe animals could think, not in the way he defined the term, but he wasn't much impressed with human thinking, either. He referred to the human brain as a clown car parked between our ea...
Do unto others’ is an unnatural, inhuman behavior. You can understand why so many churches and churchgoers say it but so few achieve it. It goes against something fundamental in our natures. And this,...
A night that began with mind-reading a grateful crustacean and ended with drunken elves would be a night to remember.
Up on the Magdalen Islands, eight crew members from the Sea Shepherd sprayed more than a thousand seal pups with a harmless but permanent red dye. This dye was designed to ruin their pelts and save th...
Scientists have solved the problem of solipsism with a strategy called 'inference to the best explanation'. It's a cheap accommodation, and no one is happy about it, with the possible exception of tho...
If she was exposing more skin than usual, that was because it was going to be a hundred-fucking-six degrees. Was she supposed to wear a suit?