They checked in at the hotel that A. called in his head Hotel Auschwitz, then he spent twenty minutes shitting.

Comedy was a theatrical form Paul had never pursued; he had always been more serious, a tragedian.

I’ve seen that the apartment on the third floor in the building next door can fill up with clouds. That there can be so many, they are pushed up against the windows, and meanwhile I imagine what it’s like to stay in the apartment, if anyone can breathe in there at all. 

I know more secrets than any man I have ever met. My neighbor, Harlow Pearson, was a gambler, although this was never a secret and many people knew about it, even when he was in Congress.

In America the host had a driver whose name was Carolyn. She was twenty-four years old, tall, had studied classic languages, disliked teaching and modeling, and was glad to drive for the host.

The moist cheese on his blue-and-white porcelain, the Pinot.

If you walk through the green and chirpy tranquility of the park around the castle at Nizograd, Yugoslavia, past the Roman Baths, you will come upon a monument that might appear unseemly. Two 

When I found out that a Bosnian family had moved into our neighborhood, just across from my place, I was thrilled. I had left Bosnia seven years before, and I hardly ever saw anybody from there

My father’s assistant Nenad used to tell us stories while hammering nails into the wood to pinch the leather so no water would leak into the clogs he was making. The hammer punctuated his stories

We called her God because she wrote a poem about how Caleb Newton ejaculated prematurely the night she slept with him, and because she shared the poem with her friends.