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“... But this story is not about Chuck. Chuck Chuck, so to say. She cannot have endured the man for long, but she did – because hers is a tale of passion. See how she stroked her salvage – as she dusted the elk family figurines that Chuck gave her – as she tried to bring back strong memories of adoration or lust. And can you believe that? – that Chuck Rosso, whom she had depended on, refused to help her in the shower when she broke her leg ...”

“... So what about the mother and daughter’s shared jealousy, guilt, strain or pain – those?Oh, must everybody have to deal with those?Don’t imagine.The mother is a slightly brave, a slightly unembarrassed person who can be quite social and today she has just written this letter.Dear Teresa,Well, I don’t know how to say I am wretched. It is terribly sad that I am living at the end of the saga ...”

“... Her son is zigzagging on the lawn behind her house and he holds his new toy in his arms as if it is a babe in his arms.It is the Easy Disk – which is painless to catch, cuts through the wind, floats on the water, flies up to one hundred and twenty feet, and is composed of a flexible, grippy material – but still, he has no one to play with.His son is out there also, although his son is not yet old enough to walk, and is not interested in crawling either ...”

“... Devotional‘Thank god you don’t hold a grudge,’ he said, and I discovered a refreshing feeling in the room Seth Sharples and I decided to share.He is an inamorato from years ago.Of course, this feeling vanished as soon as I left that town.At the airport ticket counter for my return, the fake eyelashes of the clerk nearly jammed themselves against her eyeglass lenses with her every blink ...”

“... How best to touch these woody objects or a person?     She batted together the parts of the sycamore stick she had broken in two and then made of them the self-important capital letter T – and she spun one.     She rolled the stick over her thumb and then she tried for greater twirling speed, as she sat on the park bench that bore a personalised inscribed plaque dedicated to MY DEAREST NANCY ...”

“... All Day Rainbow SwirlWe had our shoes off and maybe this was a place where we were washing for gold, somewhat lost in the world.       I see myself at my ease fifty years ago in this old photograph, and I have held on to a vial of gold dust – I don’t know where it is – and a ruby – a ruby crumb really. It is red.       She had begged us – the woman in the picture – to take her along ...”

“... Seated WomanOh, I had my worm’s eye view of him when I was down on the carpet to pick up my ink pen that had slipped off of my lap when I stood. I saw the canopy of his jaw, his jawbones.God … will I never know if I make things better for Victor?I would need to go along with him and there was no denying he was piqued, and I was putting up resistance ...”

“... The bird’s voice was such a thick voice – it could never have been carried away by the high wind. It was a passionate voice that might have answered the question, ‘What am I living for?’ – had there only been words to accompany it.And I did get to see the bird out on a limb, opening and closing its mouth, its breast pulsing.Ruby had said, There is the bird that is singing!Perhaps we had gotten this far flung once before, where we found the beautiful tassel rue that has such an ugly common name – false bugbane – together with large and sharp, saw-toothed leaves ...”

“... He was holding up his shoe, inspecting the sole of it, and barely balancing on one leg, when I first saw him. I had asked him about the shoes – and he said any sort would do – that it was like a walk in the park, but there was an area where it was rocky. So, it was a perfect day for a climb with Crispin and Ivy – a couple of people I had gotten to know, and I had time to kill on Table Mountain, where I saw a lot of sea – the rhythmically repeating waves, from a plunging perspective ...”

“... With this New Greasiness One of them breaks the routine at the office usually – mouths off or is sullen, every once in a while. The man said, ‘You know why I’m here, Jane.’ Jane grabbed at the man where some soft flesh is, with some force, perhaps because so many persons were no longer in her life – not Titus or Roddy, Mamie or Cecelia Bouché – whom she had checked in with and needed to double-check in with often, to help her to settle down ...”

“... Perform Small Tasks ‘One second!’ I said – for everything can go cold in a day or hot. For a man like me, there’s an on and off bulb that does the deciding. I had to find a red, little glowing button – that I was able to find – that was on a timer switch, to get more light on. The furniture – like worn-out stumps sticking up – had turned into shadows ...”

“... Rushing​ out of the house for an appointment, I grabbed what I thought was Diane Williams’s Collected Stories. When I retrieved the book from my bag, I was surprised to find it was actually the latest volume of Sylvia Plath’s letters: they’re both large hardbacks whose pale jackets are touched with baby blue ...”

“... There’s​ a very short story by Diane Williams which came into my mind while I was reading Machines like Me, Ian McEwan’s 15th novel. It’s called ‘Machinery’ and it’s 104 words long. It ends: ‘For some idea of the full range of tools at his disposal, one would have to know what human longings are all about, a calm voice says calmly ...”

“... who came of age in the late 1970s and 1980s, including Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Barry Hannah, Diane Williams and Mary Robison.One of the best accounts of Lish’s influence is in David Leavitt’s roman à clef Martin Bauman; Or, a Sure Thing. He appears in the first paragraph of the first chapter disguised as Stanley Flint, a creative writing ...”

“... an argument about the handwriting of his stick-up note. In Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) the Diane Keaton character has a wild idea and is advised to save some of her craziness for the menopause. The style of joke Allen borrows so often from S.J. Perelman works in much the same way. A man disguised as a cat burglar is arrested by a couple of dogs dressed ...”