Badass.'" My grandfather sampled the flavor of the word. It did not seem to revolt him, but it was nothing he needed ever to sample again.
A few other couples joined us on the dance floor and we lost ourselves among them. I'd never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as I had since hi...
My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother's illness, but when it came to the origins of the Skinless Horse he thought he understood. The Skinless Horse was a creature sworn to...
At least he kept trying to express himself, his real self, as motley and inchoate for now as the outfit he was wearing. And maybe that was part of the purpose of middle school: to give you something t...
And then he had trained them, those lupine eyes, on her. The hunger in them so startled her that she took a step backward, striking her head against an iron pillar with such force that she later found...
His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest of him, white as a boy's - perhaps over time one's genitals emerge from the pots and bubbling vats o...
It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle.
There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not decorate it; she infused it...
You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead a thousand miles distan...
The old man had been stoking and sipping at his pipe for the last fifteen minutes as they awaited the prisoner. The smoke of his tobacco was the foulest that she, a girl raised in a house with seven b...
I told you, hon, I’m not a real person. This is my job.
A father is a man who fails every day.
As he played it off to Nat, Archy knew—felt, like the baby-shaped ache in his left arm—that neither his ability nor his willingness to care for Rolando English for an hour, a day, a week, had anything...
[My dad] didn't do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn't take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn't make the appointments. He didn't shop for my clothes. He didn't...
This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit,
The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.
Sammy performed the rapid series of operations - which combined elements of the folding of wet laundry, the shoveling of damp ashes, and the swallowing of a secret map on the point of capture by enemy...
He was aware, as he did so, of a poignant air of tragic dedication in all his actions, the dutiful routines of a doomed picket manning his lonely watch, as, beyond the next range of hills, the barbari...
Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the...
He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989.