Sublime

Flagler was crushed, but he had learned something from the building of the Ponce de Leon. In a small way, he had become a creator instead of an accumulator, and had found a more substantive sort of satisfaction in such accomplishments. As a result, he undertook to build a church in memory of his daughter and her stillborn child, a visible and posit

devoted coterie of admirers. Edmund Crispin was among them, enthusing over Write on Both Sides of the Paper (1969): “her insights into human behaviour are tethered, wonderfully effectively, to the availability of spending money and the frequency of buses…

When you are a westerner living on the East Coast, this is just the sort of folksy anecdote the city slickers expect you to tell. But I was the worst Montanan in history.

Jo looked at the bar, where she’d worked for a few summers pouring wine and shaking cocktails for the hordes from away, sunburned tourists who’d said her little seaside village was quaint and asked what folks did here in the winter. Well, this is what we do here, she thought. We gain weight and drink too much and get on each other’s nerves.

That’s what Marilyn did; she gave her body to the post–World War II archetypes of sport, art, and politics. She was the lover of—at least for—classic greatness. Pam’s in the same position, but she has to be the lover of postmodern greatness. That’s why we all had to watch her give a blow job to the drummer from Mötley Crüe.

Mrs. Amber Moltke, the artist’s young spouse, wore a great billowing pastel housedress and flattened espadrilles and was, for better or worse, the sexiest morbidly obese woman Atwater had ever seen. Eastern Indiana was not short on big pretty girls, but this was less a person than a vista, a quarter ton of sheer Midwest pulchritude, and Atwater had

I hate how many people who ought to be here in New Orleans are dead while the tourist theater continues. I hate the grief that rests all over this city. I hate that, post-Katrina, people couldn’t come home. I hate that strangers come in and vomit on its streets and buy its wares and demand to be entertained, and the truth is nobody can just say “Fu