Sublime

“Mommy’s got a firecracker inside her,” was the way my father explained it with his wide, indulgent grin. But firecrackers, I learned, were not simply bright and lively. They were unpredictable, and they could startle and frighten you, too.

He read Ask the Dust by John Fante—an L.A. novel he had never heard of—which his assistant got from the public library downtown—and finally found what he was looking for: “I just knew that was the way those kids talked to each other—the rhythms, cadences, racism.”

It was a tragic romance. Maxamillion was an old man who falls in love with a child and waits for her to grow up, only to die of old age on her eighteenth birthday.

Into the fourth July since The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald was encouraged when James Joyce came to dinner at his home in Paris.

Julie has the best skin Faye’s ever seen on anyone anywhere. It’s not just that it’s so clear it’s flawed, or that here in low sun off water it’s the color of a good blush wine; it has the texture of something truly alive, an elastic softness, like a ripe sheath, a pod.

time to sell, slowly finding its audience in the United States by word of mouth, just as it did in Brazil. And then one day, Bill Clinton was photographed leaving the White House with a copy. Then Madonna raved about the book to Vanity Fair, and people from different walks of life—from Rush Limbaugh and Will Smith to college students and soccer mom

The air outside rumbles as planes lift into the sky, while inside garbled announcements blare over the loudspeaker. Somewhere behind me, an older woman speaks in sharp, staccato Italian. But I don’t look away from the curb, my eyes trained on the crowded sidewalk outside the terminal, searching for her, anchoring my belief—and my entire future—on t