And I feel certain there must be a second set of laws, inscrutable but real, that governs exactly how much a particular individual can give to and receive from another. Some hydrology of human generos...
America’s great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imag...
I love weird or funny or beautiful sentences Joy Williams could write a microwave-oven manual and I'm sure I'd love it, because the sentences would be tuned up like music.
You could not survive your death, could you? It survived with you.
With her mauve lipstick in place and her glossy hair smoothed, she was shooting colors all around the room. Could you scare a dead boy with the vibrancy of your life?
When the door came loose, colors flooded over us. I screamed, too, and covered my face with my arms, and if Ossie hadn’t caught me I might have fallen into the wedge of canal between the shoreline and...
Whatever song we are making in this place, we are going to die without hearing.
We are all raccoon-drunk on moonlight and bloodshed and the heady, underblossom smell of the forest.
The Sticksels have met every Homestead Act requirement save one, its final strangeness, what Pa calls the wink in the bureaucrats’ wall: a glass window.
The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. When I was a kid I couldn't see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!'s fall that time folded into a st...
That was my first clue that love can warp a hierarchy; the whole pyramid got flipped on its head. My pet, because she was mine, was at the top of the chain. I cared for the squirmy swamp rats in the m...
Somehow I wasn't adding up right anymore. My parts weren't summing into myself.
Rule One: Make friends with deathTailgating in the Antarctic is no joke. We are trying to do nothing less ambitious than reverse the course of history. We want Team Krill to defeat Team Whale.Look, if...
My oldest daughter was four pounds at birth, and her appearance flooded the earth with an infinite number of horrors and perils, a demonic surge of catastrophic possibilities out of all proportion to...
Long before the kaiko change turned us into mirror images of one another, we were sisters already, spinning identical dreams in beds thousands of miles apart, fantasizing about gold silks and an imper...
I wanted to touch the edges of my life - the same instinct, I think, that inspires young mortals to flip tractors and enlist in foreign wars.
I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling, and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.
I needed a darkness that would have killed the others. And they needed me to keep it a secret from them.
I had to explain to him Mom's death, which was always hard to do. It felt like killing her again.
His words hung around, too, leaving their brain stain on the air.