Stories

I’m there inside La Fonda at the bar ordering another glass of red wine!

I received a surprise invitation to a tryout camp at Ebbets Field.

“Werewolf Seized in Southend!” “Man Who Made Love to Pavements!”

The clock kept ticking, and the investors bailed out one by one.

I cared less about the potential payoff than I did about being right.

That autumn, my first in San Francisco, I ran short of money.

To me, the very point of cooking is to wildly praise what’s wild.

They don’t dance but simply monitor our movements, like bodyguards.

“I’m sorry,” I wrote, “but I have to go back to the bookstore.” My only plan was to plead for my old job back. To my surprise, it worked. The law was safe; the law was my father. I decided to go to law school.

I am not prepared for postwar Freetown. Postwar Sierra Leone.

The world is where we brace for a joke that’s about to be played on us.

I was happy I had no one to talk to, to be alone. Happy to be in the hospital.

Hemorrhages, it was thought, do not appear for no reason.

Nothing was permanent, no friend I made, no math test I took.

Kids were just let out of school to spend the summer running in packs.

The sex in these fantasies was always a product of love.

Of the sixteen elephants, one—a lady—completely took my heart.

I think you’re carrying on to get your brothers in trouble.

He had found my younger brother Brad there on the kitchen floor.

For the first two months of class, Toby did barely any writing at all.

The first time we were alone, I knew it before he even told me.

I thought that proved he blamed me. I thought they all did.

In time the squirrel who was my friend is my friend no longer.

It was as if my dead husband was flowing within me now, like blood.

Ambition and coincidence had led me to the Royal Theatre.

“I can’t hold it any longer. I have to pee,” I finally confessed to Viola.

Despite seeing the other knockoffs, I hoped my dress would be perfect.

Her lips had the scent of the first kiss, and a thirst for justice.