2483 9 4
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When I was a boy, I always wondered if Dad were black. No one in our small town looked like Dad. He had the thick features of an Arab. If he let his hair grow, it piled up in messy loafs on his head. Of course, I never asked Dad about any of this. I wasn'
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2482154
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There’s things you can change in this world and things you can’t. We have to figure out which is which. Though I never was much good at it, I guess.
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248154
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It's July, which, if you work in a public library, means that the Summer Reading Club is in full swing. The SRC used to be just for kids, to motivate them to read when school wasn't in session. But in recent years many libraries have expanded the program to include…
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24813218
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“Spare change?” he asked the couple heading into the cineplex. They glanced at his brother, saw something was wrong with him, then at him, noting his dirty and disheveled state. They passed without a word, not even a head-shake.
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24812413
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looking space packed right in up therelike a sun bleached kite stuck in between the several bluish colorsof the sky today has its ownamazing heartbeat. I can seeit clearly from here. Oh I can feel it reverberating for miles andmiles. If I look away it…
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248164
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Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison, Roy Orbison—right now that’s all I can say.
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248151
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I remember the first time I saw her. I'd just pushed through the crowded bar and waited to place my order.
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24801516
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I forget you. Upfront: that’s how this ends.
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24801511
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She sets the muffins aside, opens herself, nymph-like, mouth spread and gritty. She pulls the dirty edge of his gray t-shirt up so to show herself to him, spreads herself across the mattress like thin flesh oil over too much canvas....
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24792918
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The story of my life/
would put insomniacs to sleep.
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247810
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- Do you get out much, Professor?
- How so? You mean to lectures?
- No, I mean, you know, say, a walk in the park, or, take in a movie, or, maybe take a chick out to dinner, show her a good time, get a few drink
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24771613
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I shuddered. This is how we are chosen
by strange and silent hands.
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247742
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So I walk behind Sandra’s desk and I put my radioactive tum-tum right up to her beaded dreadlocks and I tell her about the nuclear energy that is flowing through her right now. She laughs and screams at me the way I am sure her daughter does when someone
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247721
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A drag queen thrown from the mechanical bull Thursday night is my fault, they say, they meaning management. And because of the ensuing brouhaha and the ambulance and the medics and a thousand flannel shirts straining for a look, I failed to pick up Jenny, my six-year-old…
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24763526
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On Friday nights I'm not there.
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247622
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At a good distance, he stood. Hair, gray, stringy, long as a horse’s mane. His beard, thick, unkempt. Like a caterpillar, a smile worked across his face. No, he said. It won’t be another Miami. Not another Miami.
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24752626
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Hers is the kind of crazy that can't be masked. She's worn it on her sleeves since tenth grade.
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24752611
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...there is something quite delicious about the air between people strange to each other, something that makes my skin crackle alive with the possibility of touch...
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24751713
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We were to eat just meat and to become discombobulated over vegetables and bread and not to indulge in sex with strange men—men were all strange once you got used to their distance—were Lincoln logs, poles, boulders and scrub trees.
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24753415
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The city's hung in flashlights.
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247463
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when the devil dies he divides enough evil for everybody
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247266
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It distresses me that I do not write enough. I know I’ve told you before that I don’t read, and it may be super-ridiculous to tell you now that I don’t write much either, but that is the sad catastrophe I with affection refer to as my life.
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24721210
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1. The clouds and the shadows of the clouds. The early light, like the night undressing herself revealing pink beneath, underneath the glory and the intimacy like early love made of arms only arms fingers and…
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24721910
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I get what you want done from me. You want the old one two sucker punch that goes straightaway through to the tenderest part of the aching heart, the one that tumbles you out of your old worn out gut wrenching way of living life for…
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24721610
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Tents staked in desert land, a muted building of parched earth, in a thirty year old city with a napalm birth, they wait among gravestones in the sand.
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24711511
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247198
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bullet points about her soul
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247183
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I pick up a pile of postcards, but all the pictures are of bees. There are close-ups of the bees and their perfect anatomy. My favorite picture shows the bees swarming, and I am at the center, their queen.
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24692421
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She likes his smile and Cajun accent, his earring and dangerous ink.
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246932
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But there’s a special place in my heart for Richler’s tour de force of a novel, his grand finale, Barney’s Version. It has everything — humour, a whiff of mystery, poignancy, a suggested reading list for a literary illiterate like yours truly, the Falstaf
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