The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of researc...
The odd agglomeration of Warshaws, the product of a long and determined program of overseas adoptions, with its combination of Jews and Koreans, intellectuals, space cadets, and sharpies, no two of th...
The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering...
The girl was a labyrinth to him; only by chance and error did he ever stumble blindly into her heart.
The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball, Peavine's book began, whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When...
The evening laid its cool palm against his weary brow as if feeling for a temperature.
The annual celebrations of God’s mercy, justice, and power, the feasts or fasts undertaken in praise of His Name, the miracles He was supposed to have thrown our way over the centuries—in my grandfath...
That's why baseball is more like life than other games. Sometimes I feel like that's all I do in life, keep track of my errors.
That was how troubles arrived, mourners rushing the bar at a wake. Though they came in funereal flocks, they could be dismissed only one at a time, and that was how she would have to proceed.
THE CHOICE, BY BOTH PALESTINIANS AND ISRAELI JEWS, TO TRUST ONE another is perilous. Day after day, the mechanisms of life under occupation succeed in their aim: to disavow the possibility of commonal...
Shprintzl Rudashevsky’s wide face takes on a philosophical, even mystic, blankness. She looks like she’s wetting her pants and enjoying the warmth.
She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack. When
She was a junkie for the printed word. And lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.
She is getting old, and he is getting old, right on schedule, and yet as time ruins them, they are not, strangely enough, married to each other.
She believed that it was important to put trust in children, to hand over the reins to them from time to time, to let them decide things for themselves.
She balanced on a point between rage and its relief. Amid the layers of conscious thought and the involuntary actions of her body, Gwen found herself in possession, coolly palmed in her thoughts like...
Sara hadn’t the faintest idea of how she looked, or of what effect her deinotherian body might have on a man.
Over the years, a number of judges, among them the great Learned Hand, had attempted, tongues not always quite firmly in cheek, to sort out these fine and crucial distinctions. A legal definition of t...
Over the years I’d surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions.
One of the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing.