They had finished reading War and Peace, and now they were celebrating their triumph at a Russian supper club in Brighton Beach. There were twelve of them seated at the long table (“Just like that painting of what’s-his-name’s dinner, minus what’s-his-name,” Kyla said brightly), and, well, Derek assumed that at least half had probably finished War and Peace. Or, fine: he imagined it was safe to say that, on the whole, the table had at least started reading War and Peace.

The ants had gotten in through the shattered bottom half of Leslie’s laptop screen. Now they crawled across her green- and blue-tinted Word documents and websites one or two at a time 

On Christmas Eve I wandered around my mother’s house looking for things to wrap. For the last three days I’d been slamming doors and doing cocaine and forgetting that it was the season of giving.

I snapped my leg in two and lost the summer—six months on crutches and I’d be lucky if I didn’t limp for the rest of my life. I went to the ground for a slide tackle in a pickup soccer game and felt what turned out to be my tibia shoot through my skin. 

“This material is really close to the bone for me. I grew up in Tucson. My first job was at a TCBY. I have a sister I haven’t seen or heard from in twenty years.”

“Too often when I write personally, I simply record states of mind.”

“Jesus has a pretty mellow, Jesus-like response, delivered in Cohen’s increasingly confident baritone.”