It was a hard decision. God knows how long it took them to come to it. There were four of them, in a filthy, empty room, starving to death, and they hatched upon a plan. 

At the orangutan dome the grandfather purchases a plastic cup in the shape of an orangutan head. He offers his grandson a sip. Then he slips behind a tree with the cup and afterwards the boy isn’t allowed to drink from it.

The Parkers, father and son, came over to introduce themselves when we moved in, five years ago. Dean, the father, was slow to speak, awkward when he did. But Rick was talkative, his eyes roving

Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople? Does a nameless horse make you more nervous or less nervous than 

On a hazy summer afternoon in Los Angeles, while my wife was at work and our children were napping, I answered the ringing doorbell to find my grandmother, two months dead, standing 

No particular intention brings him to Zimbabwe, all those years ago. He simply decides one morning to leave and gets on a bus that same night. He has it in mind to travel around for two weeks and then go back.

It was very early. Ernest had no business being awake because he had no job and knew no one, was on his way nowhere and had no prospects for the day. Nonetheless, he was hungry and couldn’t sleep.

I used to be friendly with a kid called Sam Bamburger, whose mother was the first woman I ever heard of to get divorced. Sam was about nine at the time and up to that point something of an all-American

Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortland. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light,

That’s me, lurking by the elementary school wrought-iron fence, standing with my hands in the pockets of my peacoat. I’m half Chinese, half Caucasian, shoulder-length black hair, ovoid face, epicanthic