Le facce dei bambini erano stupite, esitanti. Il lento, triste, oscuro sottomarino che trasportava il carico delle loro vite, era improvvisamente emerso in superficie. Nel loro sangue ora circolava di...
It would please him well enough to amount to no more in the end than a single great organ of detection, reaching into blankness for a clue.
I saw that I could write ten thousand more pages of shimmering prose and still be nothing but a blind minotaur stumbling along broken ground, an unsuccessful, overweight ex-wonder boy with a pot habit...
His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.
Here its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves, unmistakable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect.
He ordered a slice of the house’s excellent Sacher torte and a cup of coffee that was unusually drinkable for New York, and waited.
He had yet to fall in love to the degree that he felt he was capable of falling, had never written villanelles or declaration veiled in careful metaphor, nor sold his blood plasma to buy champagne or...
Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of...
Do you think they were ever happy?Definitely, I said.Definitely?For sure.She went crazy. His business failed. They couldn't have children of their own. He went to prison. HRT gave her cancer. I shot h...
Can you imagine an infinite tree?...A tree whose roots snake down all the way to the bottomest bottom of everything?...if you've ever looked at a tree you've seen how its trunk divides into boughs, wh...
Although it was only nine o’clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he’d strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his comp...
— «Забудь о том, откуда ты совершаешь эскейп, — сказал Йозеф, цитируя старую сентенцию Корнблюма. — Тревожься только о том куда».
Wild discipline by a dozen red-shirted men. The remaining half of the black-armored Arsiyah dismounted to confront the barred gate. They could not know, as Zelikman saw plainly from the top of the ris...
Adventures befall the unadventuresome as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold.
[His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.
We can’t take pleasure in a work of art, not in good conscience, without accepting the implicit intention of the artist to please us.
There was a kind of autumnal stain in the air that reminded me of the smell of leather work gloves, a high-school locker room at homecoming, the inside of an ancient canvas tent.
The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality.
The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass toward the play structure. His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, the...
The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within...