At that age we took our fascination in the lot of the adult world. Through the peers we put to turmoil – musky boys of brashness or slighted vigor, and the balmy girls, the sweet or mousy, the striving harlequins – we accessed the quiet amblings of their mothers and their fathers.
I am on my balcony. I have been here for three days and two nights. It was my wife who put me here. It happened like this:
At dawn, when we wake, she wakes, I see: she, simulacrum of sweetie, presently bovine sweetie, clodhopper lovely, trundle fatly to her boudoir to assess the damage: six digits, the tally. These days, my girl: formidable haunches, breasts sapped of buoyancy, deflated balloon breasts, gobs of fatty skin where there ought only to be loveliness. She squirms into her negligee, once loose-fit, casual, today perilously taut, and thumps into the kitchen. When she walks her feet slap the floor.
James Frey might be the most inarticulate author alive. Also, if he is not one of the most boring, he is clearly the most bored, and his prose is so harried, so egregiously imprecise, that it reads as if it is trying to flee the very tedium of the subject matter.
After The Pillowman’s last show, I spent the night in a bed on the Intime stage. This was not my plan. Rather, my play was over: the actors were drunk, the set would soon be struck, and I, a tiny Atlas, newly liberated and upright, had merely intended to lug my mattress from its place on the stage and return it to my little bunker in the Witherspoon basement. But by the time I reached Intime – from Terrace, at 3:30 am, giddy with the removal of a gargantuan weight and hugely exhausted – I couldn’t do it. I curled into a ball and fell asleep.
An older gentleman strolls out of a restaurant on the upper eastside and sees a bum slumped against the building’s wall. The bum asks for something to eat, and the man rummages in his doggy bag and hands him a … Read More
The Nobel Prize in Literature is an important mark of Swedish achievement. Throughout its one-hundred-and-seven year history, the award has been bestowed upon many legendary writers and a number of women as well. Last week, Doris Lessing joined the ranks … Read More
The first thing they do when they get your freshman rooming preferences is they throw them in the trash. They just dump them right in, piles of them crunched up and discarded until that great big bin is brimming full with them. And then – then the real thing starts. They shut the blinds and dim the lights. They lock the office door. And finally, when everybody’s seated, when everyone is ready, they begin to assemble the hell that is our roommate pairings, exhibiting all the tact and skill of a television writing staff as they concoct these garish personal sitcoms that recall either Perfect Strangers or, for the more unfortunate, No Exit.