Sublime

Updike’s “A&P”

The table was loaded with yellowing newspapers and empty bottles and it held a single brown and wrinkled potato in which even the sprouting eyes were rotten. Red wine had been spilled on the floor, it had been allowed to dry and it made the air in the room sweet and heavy. But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact th

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned

He is the man whose life seems so under control, until BOOM, one day he does something to destroy it

wrote about Scott, for example, but I gave him a cover name: Julian [in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”].

Something happened at first sight. Lightning, thunder, cloudburst, sunshine, rainbow—the meteorology of first sight.

It was a flaking three-story house in the ancient part of the city, a century old if it was a day, but like all houses it had been given a thin fireproof plastic sheath many years ago, and this preservative shell seemed to be the only thing holding it in the sky.