BACKWARD I hid in my room. Scrubbed sand on my pecker and belly and bum. I was trying to kill the germs but my hands kept shaking and then it hit me. The man’s word. Combust. * * * The ground smoked. The police come by. Also a man in a black suit who talked […]
Grab Bag is comprised of two novels, Dark Rides and Wish Book. Is this a natural coupling? Do the two books have a particular relationship to one another? I want to say: There are no natural couplings in my books. But I won’t. It’s not true. Dark Rides and Wish Book couple nicely, I think. […]
Chapter 1 You’ve been doing the job longer than you want to think about. The bags are always waiting when you get there. Sometimes they’re leather, sometimes the cheapest nylon. But they always weigh the same. Always exactly the same. You’ve come a long way from the days of smash-and-grabs down at Union Square. You […]
“This book is what has been missing from the parenting section of every bookstore in America. It provides some much-needed irreverence in a realm (parenting) that can be prone to taking itself way too seriously, and I think its honesty will provide relief to a lot of sleep-deprived parents. And the juxtaposition of words and […]
Discussion Questions 1. Why did the author choose to name the protagonist Easter? How does her name relate to the story? 2. Describe the setting of Glorious. Why might the author have chosen to write about this time period and these places and events? 3. Why do you think Easter continuously chooses to walk away […]
One summer a few years ago, on a particularly inebriated afternoon at a house some friends of mine were looking after in upstate New York, I came across a small book of maxims of good behavior purporting to be by George Washington. The sheer oddity that our Founding Father had penned lines such as “Rinse […]
Urbanchuk “URBANCHUK’S ON HIS WAY HERE, BOSS,” Harry whispered into the telephone, pulling his chair around so that he could monitor the view from the big picture window in front of his desk. The landscape beyond the window stretched to the south, across the deep, shit-brown tidal flats, the brackish pools of water, the low-slung […]
ART: skill; human skill or workmanship. Then you got a whole page of crap on: Art Form Nouveau Paper —ful Like I’ve got the interest. Jesus. I was in the bookshop, killing time, saw the manager give me the look. That’s why I picked up a book, a goddamn dictionary, weighing like a ton, opened […]