The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.
The classic hustle is still famous, even today, for the cold purity of its execution: bring opium from India, introduce it into China00howdy Fong, this here’s opium, opium, this is Fong—ah, so, me eat...
The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what'...
THE ENGLISHMAN’S VERY SHY (FOX-TROT) (Bloat): The Englishman’s very shy, He’s none of your Ca-sa-no-va, At bowling the ladies o-ver, A-mericans lead the pack— (Tantivy): —You see, your Englishman...
Sometimes in the shadows the view would light up, usually when he was smoking weed, as if the contrast knob of Creation had been messed with just enough to give everything an underglow, a luminous edg...
Some would say eccentric. I would say stoned out of his fuckin mind, nothing personal.
Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out...
She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She t...
She has stepped out into a different night, a different town altogether, one of those first-person-shooter towns that you can drive around in seemingly forever, but never away from. The only humanity...
Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine war...
Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spec...
One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed ex...
One of their last days in unbroken country, the wind was blowing in the high Indian grass, and her father said, There’s your gold, Dahlia, the real article. As usual, she threw him a speculative look,...
One mild and ordinary work-morning in Chicago, Lew happened to find himself on a public conveyance, head and eyes inclined nowhere in particular, when he entered, all too briefly, a condition he had n...
On the face of it, Vehi Fairfield said finally, two separate worlds, each unaware of the other. But they always connect someplace.
Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn’t vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flex...
Nothing he had brought to it of his nearest comparison, Raby with its thatch'd and benevolent romance of serfdom, had at all prepar'd him for the iron Criminality of the Cape,-- the publick Executions...
Not everybody benefits from a misspent youth.
New York as a character in a mystery would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would be the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn’t going to tell it. —DONALD E. WESTLAKE
Near the exit to the blue patio, DeCoverley Pox and Joaquin Stick stand by a concrete scale model of the Jungfrau, ... socking the slopes of the famous mountain with red rubber hot-water bags full of...