Sublime

Reading is an unambiguously good thing in a life that’s been filled with mixed blessings.

Daydream

epistolary level.

Also other, more important forgettings and failures: children’s homework left unchecked, parents left un-telephoned, spousal sex un-had. Those things have to get broken for the book to get written.

‘Thirty-five is the youth of middle age,’

What My Parents Didn’t Do for Me

THE

On the one hand the scene was hilarious: the manager bullied by his staff; the priestly Pianon helplessly aroused by the loud, ribald female crowd around him. Shay has always amused herself by envisioning him as the arid scholar Casaubon from Middlemarch, transplanted to the tropics and engrossed not in the Key to All Mythologies, but in an endless