Sublime

The special fantodish chill of feeling both complicit and obliged.

When Simon was done working for the day, he always seemed a little bewildered. He kept patting his shirt pocket absentmindedly for his phone.

An excellent joke I heard at last night’s signing: It’s late at night and a man is getting ready to go to bed when he hears a knock on his door. He opens it and looks down to see a snail. “Yes,” it says. “I’d like to talk to you about buying some magazine subscriptions.” Furious at being disturbed, the man rears back, kicks the snail as hard as he

I make myself scarce in a hurry.

If you happen to live there, it’s always refreshing to view Manhattan from afar. Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.

but then her little girl came along, and her little girl’s daddy left, and before you knew it . . . she was one of them. The needy.

He was seeing beyond the surfaces of the land to its hidden truths. Some nights he sat up late on his front porch with a glass of Jack and listened to the trucks heading south on 220, carrying crates of live chickens to the slaughterhouses—always under cover of darkness, like a vast and shameful trafficking—chickens pumped full of hormones that lef

“never completely fit in one world.”