He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. I...
We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can alwa...
For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world's beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight.
Kun katson nyt Challengerin miehistön kuvaa, en näe seitsemää hymyilijää, kaunista Judy Resnickiä enkä oikeastaan edes pienoismallia sinänsä. Näen vain piilotetut rakastavaiset, joiden kohtalot ovat k...
Landsman and Bina were married to each other for twelve years and together for five before that. Each was the other's first lover, first betrayer, first refuge, first roommate, first audience, first p...
There is only one sure means in life, Deasey said, of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your abil...
Books were hungry things, and if you stayed too long in any one place, they would consume everything and everyone around you.
The winter drove them mad. It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever the question of degree. The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and everything an...
Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it's just not fantasy.
The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth's gravity and all it's analogs...
Having lost his mother, father, brother, an grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history—his home—the usual charge leveled against comic...
That's a big trunk, James said, as we jammed in the leathery old case that looked so much like the black heart of some leviathan. It fits a tuba, three suitcases, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost...
In children's drawings, all houses have chimneys, all monkeys eat bananas, and every rocket is a V-2. Even after decades of stepped-back multistage behemoths, chunky orbiters, and space planes, the mi...
It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, shtarkers,and schlemiels, whores...
She reaches down into her bulging tote bag and pulls out a small plastic box with a hinged lid. It contains a round pill box with a threaded lid from which she tips out a vitamin pill, a fish-oil pill...
But then, staring at the label on one crate, which readSWORD-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORASUITS (3)-HORAASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)-HORAJosef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was ce...
Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn't Lasker. This guy-'She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the...
You are born into a family and those are your people, and they know you and they love you, and if you are lucky they even on occasion manage to understand you. And that ought to be enough. But it is n...
I don't care what is written, Meyer Landsman says. I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the s...
People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh.[]