The world of jazz resembles the Elizabethan stage: bare, unadorned sets, little of what is performed is reduced to writing, no, or hardly any women.

“Time to check out,” I tell myself, looking at sailboats and surfers from the open window of my hotel room. I inhale minty incense and gaze down on a dark-skinned woman in a sombrero beneath towering palm trees. Laid out before her on a folding table ar

We were busy painting pictures of False Hope on the face of Reality. Tattoos really. But they faded with time. And I now know this: Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. I saw an older writer in a slouched-down Fedora, gray beard and long sc

In the cafeteria we have the cheese fries. Sara's favorite. She eats with two fingers, pinching like a crane. Cheese drips and she licks the fingers. She licks the plate. She goes for it. Big Lulu, the cook, calls from the back. “That's what I like to…

And they let the angels out at twilight, the dark twins of bats, and their troubled undersides. Never were the bats so disturbed. Never until now has true evil been so see-through, and clear.

I don't ask for much. No, don't grunt at me, it's true. Give me a smooth boulder and a stone I can hold in my hand for grinding, maybe a sharp bit of flint for scraping. A new stick I can dig with, my old one's really worn. Shrgk's mate just got her a new stick and he even…

As I filled up today casually watching what I took to be the start of a fight on pump three, I never thought that this nearly full tank would be taking me to catch you before you leave.So don't worry, because I know you do, I've got more than enough, a nearly full tank, to…

This wasn’t my first time, ever, but it was ours. This wasn’t the life of a pigeon after sex, you know, sucking some soda pop off the pavement. This was real. This was me up there on your ceiling! And I’m not so fond of lightning either. If you thou

I remember a painting of a young girl (this could have been me) who had just given birth. She was almost smiling while she slept. Her upper lip was violet with exhaustion. One hand left up behind her head where it was thrown during the exertion of birth

Burying the dead

We came wind-milling together ,up and over the blue and yellow stone bluffs, like a couple of empty yet racing nowhere fast plastic grocery bags, catching onto everything and anything in our way, and desperately trying to get free again,…

nothing. But it could be something. I don't know. We'd probably have to agree on at least one thing for it to turn around and face us. Then it would have to be named, set free. We could watch it fly away together. That's a portend to…

Wheel turning, round and round again

What you have just experienced is an entertainment of a new type, one made possible by a convergence of the latest advances in pharmacology and technology.

On October 14, 2009 Oriana Morosini appeared as the guest author on America’s most popular live television book show: The Author Answers