Years later Polyphemus still remembers the wine-soaked taste of Odysseus’s men. The barley and garlic-flavored Greeks. Their flesh a fibrous, blood-hued hummus. Their crunched bones releasing sweet marrow.

The apartment was a second-level place, so I went down the steps and looked through the stained glass window of the door. “Ah hell,” I said to myself. Raymond Carver and John Fante and Charles Bukowski were outside. I opened the door.

When we were young and small we played in the orchard. Mom made apple pies and fried apples, caramel apples and apple sauce, apple cider. Grandma’s apple butter recipe.

He never bothered converting the tip money he pocketed at the Imperial Street 24 hour car wash as his world was replete with 25 cent transactions, making quarters the perfect coin for his realm.

“Please excuse the form letter, but due to the volume of god-awful submissions that we receive, we do not have the time to crush the spirit of each writer personally.”

Besides, that might have been the area of his birth, and if so, Jacob was now the director, priest, pallbearer, driver, and custodian of a hometown funeral

Flicking the cigarette into the river the man's face becomes soft, as if waving goodbye to the only real attachment that he has felt in decades.

As a kid he had run away from the family farm and shoveled coal back East to put himself through college. Now he was just another old man in a nursing home, desperate for a drink, his blue eyes bleary, a sticky goo filming at the corners of his lips.

Alessandro was no ordinary demon (what demon is?), insofar as he had Constable Pulce's number. In demonly fashion he had Pulce's number in a way Pulce himself did not.

Paulie opens the curtains in his bedsit to sunshine. And blue skies! He basks in it for a full minute, feeling the heat on his naked body.

The light against the nylon walls of the tent gets me feeling a little down. The air's wet inside, but it's warm. The whole world outside is creaking and chirping, everything that wakes up with the dawn's first tepid blue light does so and starts making n

Some books are like old friends and when you read them, you no longer feel alone.

The world follows me everywhere. I can’t get rid of it. I’m being stalked by a planet.

“Dear, baby, what do you fear?” Or maybe it was, “Now here are the keys to the lock.”

I’ve just moved to New York City and, somehow, Scarlett Johansson is at the same party I’m at.