In the gallery of the old photographs she was always the same, staring out, while everyone else seemed disgracefully, protean, kaftaned Messiahs, sideburned Zapatas.

The lambent horror of Gwyn in Spanish (sashed with quotes and reprint updates)

Of course, these publishers, crying out for words on paper like pining dogs under a plangent moon, weren't regular publishers.

He had a large and lucent lump on the back of his neck.

Gwyn and Richard were at the Westway Health and Fitness Center, surrounded by thirty or forty etiolated drunks: playing snooker.

he photocopied and packaged it so many times that he felt like a publisher himself—or a printer, printing samizdat in a free country

the proud, moistened, middle-distance stare of a man who believes himself to have been gravely and perhaps insupportably traduced.

behind a mephitic banquette of cigarette smoke

the old super-pub with its sticky chandeliers and sodden carpet, its contrapuntal rock videos and the thick bank of dole-quaffing fruit machines

And he would tell you that quite frankly, raising his pentimento eyebrows and tensing his upper lip with a certain laconic pride.