like a scientist or a mathematician, or, she tried not to think, someone on the IT-end of the autism spectrum.

You love this city, this stupid, beautiful world. You believe in it. Of course you do. But does it believe in you? Here is what I want to tell you.

“Ooh. Ooh, so you really didn’t know. Oh shoot, oopsie-woopsie, bad on me. Well, she’s going to talk to you in the next few days about showing the apartment to realtors and the hours for open houses and all that good stuff. Unless you’re planning to make an offer! I know you’ve been there for ages! It is just you, right? Sometimes I can’t tell how

Her younger brother James, on the other hand, owned a beagle that took Prozac, which was all anyone needed to know about that.

“Meg, please.” Because if they were going to talk about this, they were going to have to be friends, and because Meg had a name that made people feel automatically friendly toward her, its cozy single syllable and indistinct old-fashionedness like invitations to intimacy.

But today something is different, as if her interior mope has transformed into weather.

The Central Library, home to six thousand books and one ghost—Agatha Cunningham, age six—was meant to itself approximate the shape of an open book—a neat architectural trick few of its patrons acknowledged as they waited grumpily for their turns on the public computers—with the atrium serving as its spine. At one end/page of the atrium was the entr

She knew that he himself lived in hoity-toity Park Slope, with all the rich white people and their SUV-strollers, and that this was his only rental property, and that he tried to do a good job—when he stopped by, he brought treats for her four-year-old, and spoke to him respectfully, as if he were indeed a tiny man—but she also knew that there was

She can remember when she first came to the orphanage (in a spotty way—she remembers the orphanage seeming new and strange but can’t recall what life had been like before, or where, or with whom) that the land was even wilder back then, the stately plantation house seeming to rise from the dirt as if Miss Murray and the Miss Shotwells had grown it