2591 5 2
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It couldn’t be a worse time for failed novelist Robert Grayson. He’s 40 and falling apart. He’s balding and accumulating a gut. His job writing technical manuals for software looks like it might get cut. Then his wife does the unthinkable and files
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25882216
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The movies he liked best were the ones in which white people played Asian leads. Since his girlfriend had left, that Barry was adopted had seemed to become more of a fact.
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258676
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In a plush leather chair, / high up a shiny skyscraper,
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2585109
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The story goes that the night before I was born my dad had a terrible headache.
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25852623
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I counted telephone poles and the seconds between them. The old highway cut straight through the sand and it seemed the road would never end. No curves. No hills. Just poles.
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25841710
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Trent’s had many phases: Madonna, Bette, leather, water sports, rollerblading, haiku, chicken queen, rice queen, muscle queen, daddy. But religion? This is new.
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258412
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I started dating the Minotaur because of Colleen; at the time she was going with a friend of his. The whole thing was a surprise to me because I'd never been attracted to Greek men. This is how it happened. Colleen's new guy, Ian, was known by many…
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25822818
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After my father moved in with his girlfriend, my mother sold the split-level and rented a two-bedroom in an apartment complex rife with divorced mothers and the under-employed.
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25822013
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disorderly black squirrels / inhabit upper Michigan
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258240
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Mrs. Bigelow loaned Tessa a black tulle maid’s uniform and helped her pin it in at the sides. She tied on Tessa the stiff white apron. Slippery, pale, opaque stockings of real silk oozed through the girl’s fingers, secured by a heavy satin garter belt
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258121
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[Her adviser] looked at her and tilted his head, smiling. Over his shoulder she saw the M104 bus cruising up Broadway, and considered diving under it. Instead she took off toward the corner, in shame, and he followed. When they parted ways, he took her ha
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258031
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In the night, a several-hundred-pound Black Bear scaled our neighbor’s back fence, bounded down the gravel footpath between our houses and, confused by the people and lights, followed his instincts up a large pine tree across the street...
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2579123
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...as a boy I rode once in an elevator with Colonel Sanders...
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25792219
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You’re broken. Your eyes don’t see quite right, and your hands don’t feel quick enough. I love you anyway.
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25784817
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Every one of them will tell you I drank so much malt liquor I could barf up a distillery and that wouldn’t be a lie.
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257793
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You’re often photographed at Martha’s Vineyard at sunrise, Key West on New Year’s Day, Coney Island on Christmas, and variously at dive bars in Montauk. You’re a woman of a certain age and you are also a woman of the world. You’re a 21st century
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25743617
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Eat slowly. Wait. Do not bring reading material. Do not bring headphones. Avoid distractions.
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25732423
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You just can’t believe your key / won’t open the front door anymore.
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25714226
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She drove me to radiation, to acupuncture and support group. She brewed me concoctions that smelled of twigs and dirt...
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257172
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I was seeking punishment so I put my lips around a bright green persimmon and bit down, the bitterness of its flesh overcame me...
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25706327
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The commandant pried her lids open with steely thumbs.
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2570168
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The possibility for numerous outcomes – the possibility of anything, really – lives on the writer’s page.
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2570263
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Usually the predawn light means bedtime for wicked guitar players, but not that bloody Sunday.
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25702519
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We were the same and different. I was wild, wild, and she was calm. A pair of dolls we were. Holding hands in thin white dresses. Running through fields. Spying on boys. Making small things from grass and weed and wildflower. One day (it was a Tuesday) al
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256862
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He told of the wilting heat, the fulgent landscape, the people....
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256731
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Lying there, with the terrible screech emanating from his chest, blaring from his open mouth, he thinks about jet planes and jack hammers and nuclear explosions. He doesn't have quiet thoughts.
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256731
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TEXT TO VICKY
This sucks! Sorry for the teen-speak Vicky, but it does. You saw me in the hospital. It's just as bad at home. They still don't know what to do for my smashed voice box. I probably won't ever speak again. (Maybe with a mechanical thing lik
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25661312
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What's missing from their bodies is nothing compared to what's missing in their heads. One man in particular, now almost 80. Wakes to the smell of napalm, cigarette smoke, gasoline. Is he still feverish? Will the fungus rot his foot? But he remembers he
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256554
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It rained on the morning of the party, and the weatherman promised it would continue throughout the day. But Marilyn didn't mind. She actually preferred entertaining in bad weather. Her rugs weren't valuable enough to worry about, and the gloomier the sky
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2561114
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A young woman in shorts removes her sunglasses, putting them on top of her head in order to study a little girl sitting on her father’s lap on the bus.
“I want to get me one of those,” she’s says, smiling. Dark eyes, her dark hair wet and hangin
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