Then he saw that in gun-colored ink on the inside of her left arm, she bore the recent history, in five digits, of her life, her family, and the world. He
The pajamas were patterned with red pinstripes and tiny blue escutcheons. Sammy was wearing a pair that had red escutcheons with blue pinstripes. That was Rosa’s idea of fostering a sense of connectio...
The handsome Vintage Internationals edition of Nabokov’s Ada, or, Ardor—an extended riff on alternate-world and time theories and a key early example in the retro-futuristic subgenre of science fictio...
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 exaltation of understanding; then understanding's bottomless regret.
The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward
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 I’d surrendered many vices, among them whiskey, cigarettes, and the various non-Newtonian drugs, but marijuana and I remained steadfast companions.
On balance, most of the time, in the ordinary course of life, it was probably best to say what was in your heart, to share what was on your mind, to tell the people you loved that you loved them, to a...
My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.
Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.
It was on the steamer carrying him through the Golden Gate that he happened to reach down into the hole in the lining of the right pocket of his overcoat and discover the envelope that his brother had...
In my experience, Detective, it's all middle game.
In his fitful eastward progress through Belgium and Germany that winter, my grandfather had shared all manner of billets: with dogfaces and officers, in misery and in comfort, in attack and in retreat...
I wasn't unkind to him. I just didn't talk to him. I didn't talk to anybody, and I didn't want anybody talking to me. That was the plan.
I liked the way the Jewish religion seemed, on the whole, to have devoted so much energy and art to finding loopholes in its crazy laws; I like what this seemed to me to imply about its attitude towar...
I do my writing in the morning, now, if the boy will let me, and in the afternoon when I’m not teaching, and sometimes in the evening when I get home from the Alibi Tavern.
He looked like a man dangerously addicted to the correction of mistaken people.
Gibson Goode to Archy: You're just being stubborn now. Stubbornness in the service of a mistaken notion is a vanity and a sin.
Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came up heads. I called Arthur.
