She asked if I needed to be measured for size “to make sure they feel really good on you,” her lips all gloss and smile. I was nineteen and knew my size but changes in weight had caused fluctuations before so maybe I'd be different…

"It was here where he’d first seen the girl—Nan. Slender, with brown hair, pale skin, sitting on a bench, and reading from a pile of papers on her lap."

The scent that drifted through the canyon most nights seeped early through his open window. He pressed his face to the screen. A young woman sat on the patch of crabgrass beside his vegetable garden and fed apple slices to a rooster standing between her legs. In her other…

Talking to Shakespeare by the riverside, I am saddened by my lust for women, how my eyes fixate on the spit that passes from top to bottom lip as they talk to me.

As soon as I discovered that nasty thing the grownups called “sexuality,” I just knew it would get me in a lot of trouble some day—with Jesus, my parents and some yucky boy—so I hid it. But my Mama and Daddy noticed my sinful sexiness way before I knew I

The impression old Updike left on a young mind.

There was a thing she liked to do in the pool—after running and sweating—and that was to exhale as much air as she could stand, then hold her nose and sink to the bottom and just look up at the surface of the water, the way the sun hit it, the way the liq