Over the course of that long day in Nordhausen my grandfather gave up the dream he had shared with the Werner von Braun of his imaginings. Along with it a half hour of something that had felt like pea...
Of all the tricks played by storytellers on their willing victims, the cheapest is the deception known in English as The End. An ending is an arbitrary thing, an act of cowardice or fatigue, an expedi...
It was the kind of dress you tend to see hanging in the closet of a woman who owns only one dress.
I was conscious, then, of a different ache, deeper and more sharp than the feeling of bereavement that a hangover will sometimes uncover in the heart.
I had a lot of disasters in the kitchen, even during the long period when I was cooking under my mother's supervision and with the benefit of her experience. I still fail all the time, in particular w...
He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel.Just watch me, he said.
From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond th...
But lately she had been starting to experience strong, inarticulate feelings of longing, of a desire to be with Joe all the time, to inhabit his life and allow him to inhabit hers, to engage with him...
Airplane Dream #13' told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an...
Но Джо казалось, что среди всего вышеперечисленного — и фаустовского гордого высокомерия в том числе — не содержалось настоящих причин того, что время от времени толкало людей все же отваживаться созд...
Male friendships are essentially quixotic: they last only so long as each man is willing to polish the shaving-bowl helmet, climb on his donkey, and ride off after the other in pursuit of illusive glo...
Breath, pressed an ear against his chest and took the poor fellow’s pulse. While he worked, he asked about the
Wow,’ said Eddie. Oriole had revealed the secret of her necklace to him many times in the past, in exactly these terms, following the script of the tour she conducted for visitors through a fragmentar...
Wie viele einsame Kinder war sein Problem nicht die Einsamkeit an sich, sondern dass er nie allein gelassen wurde, um sie zu geniessen.
When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, 'In everything but sexual preference.
When at last his moment came, he rose and stood, the only mourner at his end of the room, a solitary tower imprisoning an anonymous sorrow. First he wished for a Redeemer whose arrival he did not expe...
Walter broke off a piece of a smile and tucked it into his left cheek as if reserving it for future use.
Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.
There had been a time in high school, see, when I wrestled with the possibility that I might be gay, a torturous six-month culmination of years of unpopularity and girllessness. At night I lay in bed...
There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child's perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innoc...