Sublime

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

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel

say? I was once reading an interview with James Baldwin, and he described a frustration he had with Langston Hughes. He said when Hughes told you about a lynching, it was too realistic. That Hughes sounded like his daddy. Baldwin preferred Countee Cullen. He wanted the art, the suggestiveness, the distance to make it possible to digest horror.

But without a name, things get lost. The image, however, is clear.

Bill Walsh (who I’ve described exclusively as my personal hero since first picking up a copy of his essential text The Elephants of Style: A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English

fact-bound writer can’t go: worlds of imagination, rumination and fantasy. In return we enter into a more forgiving contract with him, allowing him to come at his subject slowly, discursively, obliquely, elliptically or just plain densely if that’s his vision. Density, in fact, is one of the qualities that William Faulkner’s fans most like about

Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period? “Hello,” he says, without turning his

Quite a strange man, thought James, watching him go – but what a relief to discover he still contained the capacity to be taken by surprise.