Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.
Coxley, a small college on the other side of the minor Pennsylvania river that split our town in two. His real name was Albert Vetch, and his field, I believe, was Blake; I remember he kept a framed p...
Chabon’s success can be traced back to three requirements: talent, luck, and discipline. Discipline, he says, is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that...
But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination...
Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it’s just not their fantasy.
At the possibility of truly being seen, something in his chest seemed to snap open like a parachute.
As any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective.
And yet for all that I still had never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things.
An invisible gas clouds his thoughts, exhaust from a bus left with its engine running in the middle of his brain.
A surprising fact about the magician Bernard Kornblum, Joe remembered, was that he believed in magic. Not in the so-called magic of candles, pentagrams, and bat wings. Not in the kitchen enchantments...
They had not been able to bear the weight of married love upon their windpipes.
Гарри Гудини блуждал по «Палладиумам» и «Ипподромам» всего мира, обремененный целым грузовым трюмом ящиков и клетей, набитых цепями, всякими железяками, ярко раскрашенными полосками металла и прочей б...
The writing of fiction is akin to the work of a stage magician, a feat of sustained deception in which by imagery and language the trickster leads the audience to believe in the existence or possibili...
My grandmother would freak you the fuck out.
[...]a man and a boy, side by side on a yellow Swedish sofa from the 1950s that the man had bought because it somehow reminded him of a zoot suit, watching the A’s play Baltimore, Rich Harden on the m...
You know I have no patience with nonsense, said the Northeast's leading wholesaler of chattering windup mandibles.
Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.
Was it even possible to forgive the dead? Was forgiveness an emotion, or a transaction that required a partner? I had made a promise to someone who would never see it kept. I wanted to respect my gran...
They wring their hands, should I do this, should I do that. They get seventeen different opinions. Then they do what they planned to do all along. If you give advice, they only blame you when it turns...
The handy thing about being a father is that the historical standard is so pitifully low.