He was having an odd paternal rush, a blood surge that was also blood and was presently hunting through Howard's expansive intelligence to find words that would more effectively express something lik...
He promised them a class that would challenge their own beliefs about the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called 'Art'. 'Art is the Western myth,' announced Howard, for the sixth year in a row...
He peered down the hallway at the shadowy form of Joyce through the glass and scratched his testicles, sadly.
Happy is the novelist, claims Nabokov, who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and...
Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts;... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul.
For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt—something is gained but something is lost. Though her friends—Merlin, Wan-Si, et al.—clapped her on the back and congratulate...
Even by the standards with which she is familiar, Liberia is exceptional. Three quarters of the population live below the poverty line—that’s one U.S. dollar a day—half are on less than fifty cents a...
Don’t give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth!
But he had underestimated the strangeness of talking about the future of his life with someone for whom the future still seemed unbounded: a pleasure palace of choices, with infinite doors, in which o...
Brute force outraged her, I think, because it was outside her beloved realm of language, and in response to it she really had nothing to say. Despite her revolutionary stylings I don't think my mother...
Between propriety and joy choose joy.
Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
And perhaps for my mother this dream was the truth, and just by dreaming it she felt she had brought it to pass.
Always the fear of consequences. Always this terrible inertia. What he was about to do to his father was so huge, so colossal, that the consequences were inconceivable - he couldn't imagine a moment o...
A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.
/Why do you insist on taking the scooter if you know you’re not going to want to use it?’The child spoke with her wet lips brushing the flesh of her mother’s ear: 'I don’t know what I’m going to want...
Within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anyone's baby, I could only be a female human, and the sex I understood was of the kind between friends and equals, bracketing conversation,...
When all the time it was that grand tree, taking up half the garden with its roots and not allowing anything else to grow.
This new delicacy, this suggestions of mortal time working on her just as it works on everybody, spoke to me more loudly than any of the old accusations of daughterly neglect ever had.
At any time of the day, corduroy is a highly stressful fabric. Rent collectors wear it. Tax collectors, too. History teachers add leather elbow patches.