In England, we once had an insulting name for such people: trimmers. In the mid-1600s, a trimmer was any politician who attempted to straddle the reviled middle ground between Cavalier and Roundhead,...
If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves. She was walking it right now. With e...
If she was more curt with her own family than a homeless man this only suggested that generosity was not an infinite quantity and had to be employed strategically where it was most needed.
I will admit that in the past, when I have met connoisseurs, I’ve found it a bit hard to believe in them entirely. Philistinism often comes with a side order of distrust. How can this person possibly...
I thought of that William Gibson quote: The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
I got something to tell you, said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice.
I felt I was losing track of my physical location, rising above my body, viewing my life from a very distant point, hovering over it.
I didn't know what to do with all of the sadness. A hundred and fifty years! Do you have any idea how long a hundred and fifty years is in the family of man? She clicked her fingers, and I thought of...
I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it. You
How much longer on the divan? Why does sex have to mean everything? OK, it can mean something, but why everything? Why do thirty years have to go down the toilet because I wanted to touch somebody els...
How many times,’ Samad growled, after watching his son purchase the autobiography of Malcolm X, ‘is it necessary to say thank you in a single transaction? Thank you when you hand the book over, thank...
Here’s the funny thing about literary criticism: it hates its own times, only realizing their worth twenty years later. And then, twenty years after that, it wildly sentimentalizes them, out of nostal...
He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracti...
He saw that the highest compliment a white Englishman can give himself is the assertion that he is color-blind, by which he means he has been able to overlook the fact of your color—to look past it—to...
Faced with the same reality, we in the West tend to opt for a stiff drink instead. But people will insist upon shooting us sideways glances and saying things like, It’s two o’clock in the afternoon! a...
Extreme inequality fractures communities, and after a while the cracks gape so wide the whole edifice comes tumbling down.
Everyone in both Natalie’s workplace and Frank’s was intimately involved with the lives of a group of African-Americans, mostly male, who slung twenty-dollar vials of crack in the scrub between a conc...
Everybody’s path crossed with hers at the same moment, as soon as she emerged she was uncontained by space and time, with not one path to cross but all paths—they were all hers, like the Queen in Alic...
Early on, for better or worse, I chose whose child I wanted to be: the child of the novel.
Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 0627 hours on January 1, 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate fac...