Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not decorate it; she infused it.
He also loved the city itself. Coming to and leaving Cousin Joe’s, he would gorge himself on hot dogs and cafeteria pie, price cigarette lighters and snap-brim hats in store windows, follow the pushbo...
Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake.
Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.
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...
Bina rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, glances at the door. Then she comes over and drops her bag and plops down beside him. How many times, he wonders, can she have enough of him, already, and still...
A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.
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...
А затем тот человек серьезным, но учтивым и умудренным тоном напомнил Максу, что свобода — это долг, который может быть оплачен только завоеванием свободы для остальных.
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...
Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.
When the two of us were at last free and clear of our past entanglements, social and professional, Sara and I were married here, at the Town Hall, by a justice of the peace who was a distant cousin of...
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...
Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfat...
My heart was simultaneously broken and filled with lust, I was exhausted, and I loved every minute of it. It was strange and elating to find myself for once the weaker.
Like 90 percent of the television they watch, it comes from the south and is shown dubbed into Yiddish. It concerns the adventures of a pair of children with Jewish names who look like they might be p...
In photographs she is a boxy woman, girdled with steel, shod in coal-black stompers, her bosom so large it might have housed turbines. She was all but illiterate in Yiddish and English but obliged my...
In my innocent cynicism I didn't see that Cleveland was not trying to look tough; he just didn't care. Which is to say, he knew what he was, and was, if not content with, at least resigned to knowing...
If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the expl...