Sometimes I went during my lunch break into a big nursery across the street, a glass building full of plants and wet earth and feeling of cool dead sex. During this hour the same woman always watered the dark beds with a hose.

A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping … A Cherokee filled with bourbon … A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student …

And a family from Marshalltown who head–onned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri …

In the summer of 1917 Robert Grainier took part in an attempt on the life of a Chinese laborer caught, or anyway accused of, stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle.

“My mother dumped my father for an ostrich farmer,” Vince said yesterday. We were in a semi-private room in the heart wing of Spohn Hospital. I lay on the other bed and said, Did she now?

“My client is feeling very insecure this week,” Stebbins said, swinging his feet up onto the leather couch, leaning his head back against the paper antimacassar, and lighting up a large cigar.

Every now and again, as if on a whim, the Federal government people would write to Marie Delaveaux Wilson in one of those white, stampless envelopes

By the time we finally reached the Castro, I genuinely believed Anne had gotten rich off being gay alone.

It is a country where you can touch nothing: the food, the toilets, the people. The flies are everywhere. You come with your pockets stuffed with money, but there’s nothing you can buy for fear of contamination, and nothing you can let touch you.

I’m going to ask the Queen. I’m going to tell her what I know and ask her what is true, and if she winks at me, well, there will be trouble. This is me, Seamus Todd, born in 1955, ordinary soldier of

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being childbirth, this will be a three.

A three? Really?

Yes. That’s what they say.