There was something stunned in the faces of the children, blinking and tentative. The slow, dark, dull submarine of the lives in which they were the human cargo had abruptly surfaced. Their blood was...
The two dozen commonplace childhood photographs - snowsuit, pony, tennis racket, looming fender of a Dodge - were an inexhaustible source of wonder for him, at her having existed before he met her, an...
The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.
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 other fellow was more of a fireplug, broad in the chest and shoulders, with a wide pugnacious face and the hint of a shadow even on his freshly shaved jaw. He always looked as if he had not dresse...
The officious swagger in her gait might have been some flavor of self-possession or the cool skedaddle of a shoplifter making for the door. In either case, the streamer of toilet paper that trailed fr...
The near death of a world-famous painter in a diving accident, in a Greenwich Village drawing room, contributed an unimpeachable Surrealist luster to the party.
The hidden master of the Filipino-style Chinese donut is Benito Taganes, proprietor and king of the bubbling vats at Mabuhay. Mabuhay, dark, cramped, invisible from the street, stays open all night lo...
The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward
The brake and gas were rigged to suit a man of his stature, and he handled them like Horowitz sailing through a storm of Liszt.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The
That evening I rode downtown on an unaccountably empty bus, sitting in the last row. At the front I saw a thin cloud of smoke rising around the driver’s head. ‘Hey, bus driver,’ I said. ‘Can I smoke?’...
So you were going to shoot him, Dick says. That’s some badass fucking therapy, you guys. Damn! Strict Freudian, huh?
Singletary arched an eyebrow then, after taking a look around the room, smiled a dubious but encouraging smile, the way you might smile at someone about to depress the ignition button on a homemade je...
She can’t go in there, he says firmly. It isn’t appropriate. See this, sweetness? Bina has fished out her badge. I’m like a cash gift. I’m always appropriate.
Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big black eyeglasses!
On the way out again, I suddenly saw everything clearly: Sigmund Feud painting his cocaine onto his septum, the rising uproar of the past hour and a half, the idling Audi full of rash behavior that la...
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...
Never worry about what you are escaping from, he said. Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to.
My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There