Shaw used to be a model and is still beautiful, fierce and timid both, like a coyote or a wild dog—more beautiful, in that way, than when she modeled. Harley is strange-looking, as plain as butter, huge, and

Before I had even gone away, I started polishing San Francisco as if it were a pair of glasses to look through and every new thing dust and dandruff; so the day of the farewell party gleamed and curved the world

Although she had been around them her whole life, it was when she reached thirty five that holding babies seemed to make her nervous—just at the beginning, a twinge of stage fright swinging up from

Sometimes I went during my lunch break into a big nursery across the street, a glass building full of plants and wet earth and feeling of cool dead sex. During this hour the same woman always watered the dark beds with a hose.

Chance put the widower next to the widow. Or maybe chance had nothing to do with it, for the story began on All Souls. Be that as it may, the widow was already there when the widower tripped, stumbled,

Animal contact can alter what Castaneda calls “assemblage points.” Like mother-love. It’s been slobbered over by Hollywood. Andy Hardy goes down on his knees by his mother’s bed. What’s wrong

Brandauer had Tuna Fish for lunch every day of the nine years I knew him. Sometimes on rye toast, sometimes on white bread, sometimes with a Coke, sometimes with a small glass of milk. Not a full size

This is the story of K and B, analyst and patient; specifically, this is the story of their first session together, before K had cured his patient, “dispersed” B, as he’d say, helping him to become 

This excerpt is from Naguib Mahfouz’s The Journey of Ibn Fattouma, a parable-like short novel published in Arabic in 1983; the English translation is forthcoming this year from Doubleday.

We were in the car, swinging through the traffic, & the air inside drooped with folded wings at the shut windows & the scent she used, sweeping through the streets that swirled in eddies of changing light, talking