I smoked and looked down at the bottom of Pittsburgh for a little while, watching the kids playing tiny baseball, the distant figures of dogs snatching at a little passing car, a miniature housewife o...
I closed my eyes and I thought of the lash of her skirt snapping around her as she danced one evening in a bar on the South Side to a jukebox that was playing Barefootin’, of the downy slope of her ne...
His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. P...
He checks with the mandolin man on the roof; there is always a man on the roof with a semiautomatic mandolin.
Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came up heads. I called Arthur.
Childhood is a branch of cartography.
But Josef, like many boys of nineteen, was under the misapprehension that his heart had been broken a number of times, and he prided himself on the imagined toughness of that organ.
As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like How sane are we? and Do our lives have meaning? The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.
As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really only the latest chapter in a lifelong history of inadequacy and powerlessness.
Always true to the code, she said.
A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.
Silence was darkness, and that naming shone a light.
Selvage of gray-blue radiation from the kitchen tube fringed the bedroom door and mingled with a pale shaft of nocturnal Brooklyn, a compound derived from the halos of streetlights, the headlamps of t...
Man coming toward him over the ice, watching
Burned off their mutual contempt by abusing the counter help. My
You would never do anything like that, would you? my wife asked him. You would never hurt animals.Our son shook his head, looking offended by the question. He might have been lying, but my knowledge o...
You hit me with a tuba, he said, looking at me with an air of hurt surprise. I know, I said. I’m sorry. A sheet of paper came whistling up and flattened itself against my
You got the good heart. Underneath all the other stuff. Good heart is eighty-five percent of everything in life.' ...'What is the other fifteen percent?' Nat said. 'Just out of curiosity?''Politeness,...
Without the witty, potent dialogue and the puzzling shape of the story, the movie would have been merely an American version of the kind of brooding, shadow-filled, Ufa-style expressionist stuff that...
When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greate...