Sublime

She’d locked their bedroom doors, one by one. Locked everything as they slept, except one way out. And then she’d gone downstairs to where they’d kept the alcohol, and the kerosene, and all those reeking fluids, and found a match… A struck match sounds like a kiss in the dark, sometimes. She remembered thinking that, watching the flame crack to lif

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish is to be forgotten.

glacial exhalation.

Adam waits, month by month, for the choked black walnut to die and take his baby brother with it, smothered in his own clown-covered coverlet. But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

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

languor that sat upon the city, like a lover’s tired, unsteady

The death of Wolfe’s father in 1922, when Tom was earning his Master of Arts degree at Harvard, so traumatized the author that it took hundreds of pages in graphic detail before he wrote it out of his system.