Confronted by the tetanic twitching of his individuality under the smooth skin of teamwork, I saw all the more clearly what was different about him, and I knew I loved him because I liked him better than the others.

My father comes into my room. “Look,” he says. He carefully opens his hands: a luminous, gold-colored butterfly sits in the bowl of his palms, like a light he has carried into the dark room.

I worked nights as a phone operator, and it was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. The money wasn’t good, but it wasn’t awful either, and although the place looked inhospitable—a cramped office on Guardia Vieja, whose only window looked out on an immense gray wall—it was a pleasant place to work: not too cold in winter or too hot in summer.

There are three elements to the photograph. There is the grocery cart in the background, the white Renault hatchback in the foreground, and then at center there is the reclusive philosopher who explored literature’s impossibility. 

Marilyn Minter was a photography student at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, in 1969. 

For a long time I worked on an essay about a fairly obscure American film made in the seventies by an actress, the only film she directed, which she starred in herself, an essay that I published in a small journal and thought perhaps I would turn into a book.

For a long time we wanted to get a second dog. Then we had a baby, and I had to give up this desire for a while.

This morning, Esther Saint-Juste did nothing between the time she woke up and the time she got out of bed. There is nothing she’ll be able to tell her husband when he calls just before lunch.

I found out only later that when my ma called Ensign Wang a lunatic, she’d meant it literally—he really was a mental patient.

My shrink has an office in a walk-up above a pizza parlor. He’s new in the business, and since he has very few patients as yet, and sometimes hours between appointments, he works part-time as a pizza chef.