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 natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings.
The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever 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 lucky ones are the people like your husband there. The ones who find work that means something to them. That they can really put their heart into, however foolish it might look to other people.
The local drunks - there must have been about sixty-five or seventy of them, many related by blood or sexual history - were a close-knit population involved in an ongoing collective enterprise: the bu...
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 hair on the back of the neck stood erect and you ran, in spite of yourself, ribs ringing with panic, certain as a child running up the cellar stairs that something very bad was after you.
The exaltation of understanding; then understanding's bottomless regret.
The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward
The confirmed stick-in-the-mud will always fall victim to the interventions of other people acting on impulse, because if habit is his religion, then his Satan is change, and in the end, we are all pr...
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?’...
Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.
So you were going to shoot him, Dick says. That’s some badass fucking therapy, you guys. Damn! Strict Freudian, huh?
She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.
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...
Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual words; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random hap...
Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows that it's a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling moth...