Sublime

Hammett devised this parable, one may conjecture, to justify himself. Charles Flitcraft is a critique of everything Hammett had rejected in his life and work. Flitcraft’s casual and cruel abandonment of his family, and the equally casual and cruel creation of a new family, is Hammett’s judgment on those outwardly contented human beings, endlessly r

In John Steinbeck’s book Travels with Charley, he moves across the country with a black dog. And the repeated joke he depicts, and it is nauseating, is that when he stopped for gas in the South, people kept saying, “I thought that was a nigger in your car.” The joke was a warning. Charley could not, after all, be in the front sitting alongside a Wh

I wish you’d advise me, Thomas.’ ‘What about?’ ‘Phuong.’ ‘I wouldn’t trust my advice if I were you. I’m biased. I want to keep her.’ ‘Oh, but I know you’re straight, absolutely straight and we both have her interests at heart.’ Suddenly I couldn’t bear his boyishness any more. I said, ‘I don’t care that for her interests. You can have her interests

We read Faulkner for the beauty of his horrible creations, the beauty of the writing, and we read him to find out what life is about from his point of view. He expresses this through his characters.

My appearance, he thought. Yes, that is it. How do I appear? There is no deceiving anyone; I do not belong here. On this land that white men cleared and built one of their finest cities. I am an outsider in my own country.

Florida drew the transient and rootless on the eternal promise of a second chance, with more than its share of scammers and con men. So who was to say the guy living next door wasn’t one of them? A subdivision like Carriage Pointe was Jane Jacobs’s vision of hell.

It was strange that a Negro could be an officer and a gentleman and an equal below Parallel Thirty-eight, but not below the Mason-Dixon line.

I do admire the terror which Negroes are able to inspire in the hearts of some members of the white proletariat and only wish (This is a rather personal confession.) that I possessed the ability to similarly terrorize. The Negro terrorizes simply by being himself;I, however, must browbeat a bit in order to achieve the same end. Perhaps I should hav

“I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”