Sublime

you were just another cog, just the smallest possible pinion in the engine of global progress, one of mass culture’s million tiny underwriters, dispersing risk.” “And how was I doing that, exactly?” “It was your whole starving artist ethos, that whole rebel-without-a-cause motif. Back then, we really believed that the worst person in the entire sou

But as is so often the case with men who have made it like this, he was arrogant and self-righteous.

a furry, flattened body with a red/gray ejaculation of blood and brains having burst from his little exploded head. To Kugel, chipmunks looked as if they’d died of a good idea;

could also have said that it’s a critique, an embodied critique of the middle-class cult of personal safety. It’s a rejection of the belief that every vulnerability should be protected, and that the central project of our lives is to undo our own precarity. It’s a refusal of a way of life devoted to insurance.

At age fifty he viewed himself, after publication of two books of nonfiction, one on the war, the other a personal account of the Irish troubles, plus the short story collection and innumerable articles for national magazines, as a conundrum, a man unable to define his commitment or understand the secret of his own navel, a literary gnome. He serio

At the airport, leaving Nashville, I had a taste for something sweet. I stood in front of the vending machine, trying to find a treat that was both satisfying and not too bad for me. Ridiculous, I know. To my left, a White man hovered. He was pale and small with a drawn face. He had a cap on, and a dark blue uniform that hung on him, leaving his br