“you ask me to be patient. i paint an old bookshelf

& remember my posture, the way blossoms become

one last thing.”

"I loved that, no matter where the characters went underground, they came out into the same space..I could see a double-paged spread showing a huge old fashioned attic — full of the different entry points. To me, the story said, whatever you think you know about the rules of life, forget it, ain’t necessarily true."  

Rivka Galchen has never published the same kind of book.

Labor Day weekend at the Brown family beach house was a time-honored tradition, so it only made sense that George would make the long trip up from Washington.

The first house I ever worked on with my father was a farmhouse with syringes and beer cans ground down deep in the yard. It was my job to rake them out so as not to ruin the mower. But I ruined the mower anyway when a live shotgun round went off and bent the blade. In response, my father handed me a scythe. 

You people read about our town in the news—first the rape allegations, then Dolly Molly, then the car accident—and you think you know what happened. You think you know something about who we are.

A silver-bearded man stands in the middle of a sidewalk spotted with gum, a bamboo rice paddy hat tilted on his head, and he cups his hands at his waist and asks in monotone: “Can you help me? I’m poor.”