Just past midnight, when it looked like things might get out of hand, Greer brought out the baseball bat he kept under the bar and, holding it cocked, edged toward the tall red-haired punk with the bad mouth, and his two jerk friends. “Time to go home, boys,” he said. “You better think, man,” the…
I once told Percival Everett that of the impressive people it’s been my good fortune to meet, he is the least impressed with himself. His response was characteristic and delivered in a complete and sincere deadpan, “Well, I’ve met me.” This willingness to foreground the work over the artist is especially notable about someone who…
Translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval I ask where the things go that did not arrive at their destination. The majority of things. The largest inventory in the world. Where are they going to end up, the things that do not end up anywhere. Those that fail, those that have no remedy….
The woman having a miscarriage bumps into the woman getting an abortion. It is New Year’s Eve. They are both in line at the pharmacy, buying ibuprofen. One carries a basket holding a bottle of wine, the other four candy bars. There are many people ahead of them. “Those look good,” says the first, glancing…
In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled. I’m what surfers call a goofy foot. I surf with my left foot back. The etymology of goofy foot is disputed, but consensus points toward the cartoon character Goofy, who surfed with his right foot forward…
Translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval The blue sky remained Everything else No
The Sahara it is not. At night, the little tourist caravan arrives at a wave of dunes cresting beneath the starry sky. But during the day, they carry on through splotches of the unvaried scrub that is Rajasthan’s Thar. Trees are occasional, of a variety that gives the camels gas and causes them to slobber…
Early in his career, Robert Duncan introduced himself to two editors by writing, “all that I aspire to do is communicate somehow my psychic experiences—as the young druid poets and those who wore the cloak of blue feathers in Ireland and all poets must do.” In comparison, contemporary cover letters seem positively self-effacing. On trips…
Pin the ozone layer on me: I drove my Hummer into the sky when I gunned through a red light. I hit outer space; I clearly went too far. It’s hard to tweeze apart a hole from the everyday emptiness of air. Hard to touch upon a hole & not sail right through. One day…
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