Fiction 2010

Howell was never caught. He lent a certain grace to his grift, even value to whatever he grabbed. The widows never felt cheated.

Paiko had been waiting for his girlfriend to have sex with her last client when the police raided the brothel. Now he was before the kangaroo court in Area F, which had the worst torture chamber in the country.

I’d become obsessed with my Neighborhood Watch duties, and my wife had taken up with Bob Martin. But that wasn’t what bothered me.

The place where we are joined is a secret place for Hattie and me—a bone hinge covered in smooth skin. But lately, Hattie hates our hinge. She has fallen in love.

The nature of this retreat was silence, silence rejuvenant, unbroken, utter. Three years, three months, and three days of it in their search for enlightenment.

He had become used to the way Marc turned questions around. His son was like Superman in that way, catching bullets in his hand and redirecting them. His own father had never answered his questions. He was not sure which was worse, to be mocked or to be ignored.

The man next to my father at the bar winked shyly at me. I had seen this man before. His name was Russell. He wasn’t a member of our club, but he and my father were friendly. He was a former Army officer, and he restored classic cars. “He’s unstoppable,” my father often said. “That man’s unstoppable.”

The case against writer’s manuals

On monks, technology, attention spans’and the continued necessity of just leaving home

In 2008, the author lost her husband of 48 years. In her early days of widowhood, she found that teaching— an act of communication, of sympathy, a reaching-out—was a way of allowing others into the solitude of one’s soul.