Sublime

Sylvanshine could almost literally see the small pink man drinking Pepto-Bismol straight out of the bottle and going home to a woman who treated him like an uninteresting stranger.

There was already a well-known nature writer named David Rains Wallace, so Fred Hill, Nadell’s boss, who had once worked for Sierra Club Books, suggested he use his full name.

Bent, he composed the flesh of his face, shaped a cool but respectfully cool and by no stretch of the imagination pained eye with which to meet the inevitable eye of the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production.

(with college-age children and a wife who always appeared about to ululate)

looking like the massed and floating victims of some hideous mishap—from this height a macabre and riveting sight.

at the rate a feather falls.

Something has taken the tight ratchet in Joelle’s belly and turned it three turns to the good.

Here is one of the great Wallace innovations: the revelatory power of freakishly thorough noticing, of corralling and controlling detail.

He wedged his hand between them to point at himself, which meant he was now holding Erdedy off the ground with just one hand, which fact was not lost on Erdedy’s nervous system.