Activity

After two days of reading, I had tottered from the library into the empty husk of “downtown,” across the river from our house, nearly all of whose commerce had been leached away by malls far to the east of the river, out by the interstate. My mother beeped her horn from the parking lot across the s…

When I was at Iowa, Frank Conroy, Engle’s longest-running successor, did not name the acceptable categories. Instead, he shot down projects by shooting down their influences. He loathed Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, Barthelme. He had a thing against J. D. Salinger that was hard to explain. To go anywhere…

The TV hurls out images that reproduce the system and voices that echo it, and there is no spot on earth it does not reach. The entire planet is a huge suburb of Dallas. We eat imported emotions as if they were canned sausages while the young children of television, trained to watch life instead of…

“It’s so nice here,” I whispered. Sam didn’t know it, but this was my final attempt. I was giving him one last chance to reveal some soft part of himself he’d kept hidden.

What! How can so many thoughts and observations possibly have elapsed in so brief a period? An impressionist will answer along the lines of “The distortions inherent in our perception of time,” but to us counters, time is a bore— and not just because too much has been said and written about it. Tim…