Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you're right up against her naked soul.

He didn't hide his teeth, which were bright yellow, like the van we'd unloaded.

To tugboat was to try Minna's patience. Any time you pushed your luck, said too much, overstayed a welcome, or overestimated the usefulness of a given method or approach, you were guilty of having...

The big Nazi cat went on raking up thread-loops from my trousers, seemingly intent on single-handedly reinventing Velcro.

on the one hand there's mansplaining, and on the other, there's the sound of a woman quoting the mansplaining to another woman.

Television had elected itself, I figured. It could watch itself too, for all I cared. I read my book.

So I took my phone to a bakery and coffee shop called Some Crust and read Elena Ferrante at an outdoor table and hoped for some amusing college student to hit on me. I got hit on by amusing senior...

Like other names I censored lately, this was a vote against invoking monsters, against etching their reality into the air.

The Hippie Parents weren't for all their distraction and funk, for their love triangles and LPs and antiwar demonstrations, illiterates...You'd find the books in the downstairs bathroom, or on their...

Let him get stoned, since everybody must.

Cocaine soup with titty snacks

Laughing at "Rapper's Delight"'s no revenge, and anyway it wasn't your idea, and anyway it's . Dean Street's another story, a realm of knowledge unapplicable here.You've just about finished leaving...

It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. The song, that song, was sent from somewhere else to find...

You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma. {p. 5}

We were all four of us an arrangement around a missing centrepiece, as incoherent as a been less sentence.

They were drones, men costumed in independent thought who'd become slaves of party groupspeak. {p. 4}

Except science now tells us that luck is there whether you acknowledge it or not. And I'm afraid in your case I see the signs of a history of bad luck. Not even a latency so much as a full-blown case...

She reassembled her deranged silent treatment of the whole of the twentieth century, but it quit before she could fire it.