The story of Janie’s progress through three marriages confronts the reader with the significant idea that the choice one makes between partners, between one man and another (or one woman and another)...
The other problem with Brother Ibrhm ad-Din Shukrallah, the biggest problem perhaps, was his great affection for tautology. Though he promised explanation, elucidation, and exposition, linguistically...
The only thing to see is the obligatory third-world Coke billboard, ironic in exact proportion to the distance from its proper American context. This one says COKE—MAKE IT REAL. Just after the Coke si...
The lady was old, the lady was ill. It didn't matter what the lady believed.
The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in this world—in its dramatic as well as its quiet times—we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or to apply ourselves...
Sometimes you get a flash of what you look like to other people.
Some people--Samad for example--will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day--football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds--but Archie's never felt that wa...
She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive. That’s what her plain white linen trousers were for, her blue-and-white-striped Breton T-shirt, her frayed espadrilles, her s...
She what it means. Oh, wonderfully bright at 6 a.m., yes, wonderfully clear for an . But the shorter the days, the longer the nights, the darker the house, the easier it is, the easier it is, the eas...
Prove to me that you are right. Prove to me that you are more right than God. Nothing on earth would do it. Because Ryan didn't believe in or care about anything on earth.
Once they were the same age. Now Leah is aging in dog years. Her thirty-five is seven times his, and seven times more important, so important he has to keep reminding her of the numbers, in case she f...
Now, another way to think about this is that Shakespeare’s ego was so very insatiable he thought he could speak for everybody: a black duke, a transvestite girl, a carefree prince, a mad king. But we...
No one is more ingenious than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.
Most e-mails sent in the mid-nineties tended to be long and letter-like: they began and ended with traditional greetings—the ones we’d all previously used on paper—and they were keen to describe the s...
Leah watches Natalie stride over to her beautiful kitchen with her beautiful child. Everything behind those French doors is full and meaningful. The gestures, the glances, the conversations that can't...
Lanier is interested in the ways in which people reduce themselves in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. Information systems, he writes, need to have information in o...
It’s the fear of being mistaken for Joyce that has always ensured that I ignore the box marked biracial and tick the box marked black on any questionnaire I fill out, and call myself unequivocally a b...
It's easy to confuse a woman for a philosophy
It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them.
It seems to me, said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an X. I...