He was never unfaithful to Bina. But there is no doubt that what broke the marriage was Landsman’s lack of faith.
He had been an indifferent father, better than his own, perhaps, but that was saying very little. When Tommy was still an unknown fishboy inside Rosa, Sammy had resolved never to let him feel abandone...
He and Dolores had been married thirty-one months before parting. There had been an extramarital kiss, entrepreneurial disaster, a miscarried baby, sexual malaise, and then very soon they had been for...
At any rate it is impossible to live intelligently as a member of a minority group in a nation that was founded every bit as firmly on enslavement and butchery as on ideals of liberty and brotherhood...
this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing
The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word,...
One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an anc...
Never say love is like anything... It isn't.
Kornblum was, nevertheless, unable to resist offering that final criticism to his erstwhile pupil on his performance that night. Never worry about what you are escaping from, he said. Reserve your anx...
It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like The Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and the straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roam...
I'm disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried, I only got halfway there. You try to take advantage of the time you have. That's what they tell you to do. But when you're old,...
I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and con...
I don’t look stoned? My heart began to pound. The classic aim of a pothead is always to look perfectly straight—and if possible operate complicated machinery—while immense shrieking nebulae are coming...
He reached up and out with both arms to shoot his cuffs, and for an instant he might have served to illustrate the crucial step in a manual on the seizing of days. He had already seized this particula...
He didn't say anything. He lay there with his eyes closed for a long time after that, sculling along the surface of the sea of pain a little nearer to his story's end or maybe, if that great eschatolo...
And the next moment the fierce wind comes screaming, whirling the needle-pointed dust, stifling all hope. And you know then that what has not happened will never happen. That hope is an end within its...
A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.
A father is a man who fails every day.
{...} I was okay with things the way they were. No, not okay: I longed and suffered and pined with the rest of humanity. Sometimes I was happy enough with the book I was reading or the book I was writ...
You could blow on a fire to stoke it, but if you blew on a little flame, it would go out. He headed up into Woodberry