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But the art business had come to disgust him. Later he would remember with a shudder “the nervous anxiety of the bidder’s face…
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After spending a restorative but freezing two nights in a friend’s uninsulated cabin in the Chiricauhua Mountains, I wrote to my friend, telling him I’d be back, but not until April, and ended up confiding about problems I’d been having with someone very close to me. ”It will all be better in the spring, one [...]
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originally published in The Rumpus In Carolyn Cooke’s recent novel, Daughters of the Revolution, Cooke has set the mark of her anger, along with her exquisite sentences, on the ultimate crucible of American male power: prep school. Given the sensitivity of the subject – still – perhaps it is not surprising that the book drew [...]
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“Honey, I’ve been thinking we should hyphenate.” My husband shoots me a pissed-off look. “You know, Zakin-Suleiman. Or Suleiman-Zakin.” “We can talk about that later,” he mutters. We are halfway down the jetway, waiting to find out whether we can get back on our flight to San Francisco. Minutes before, a flight attendant’s voice had [...]
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After whining unconvincingly about having a headache, my Kenyan husband explained why he didn’t want to go to my god-daughter’s dance performance at Lowell, a public high school in San Francisco. “You remember when you went to a wedding?” he demanded. I thought back to the Swahili wedding I attended on Lamu before we were [...]
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“Sorry, Suzanne, but I can’t drive you to the airport. I would be too afraid to drive back alone at night,” my friend Marie-Chantal said. I looked at her, doing a quick calculation in my head before realizing Marie-Chantal* wasn’t making an excuse; she was truly scared. I had lived in Madagascar for three months [...]
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This year, my husband almost voted. Not big news, you say. But in its own way, it was. When Gabe first told me that he had never voted in an election, I had the usual American good girl reaction: I was shocked. “But it’s your civic duty!” I remember saying. Then I learned more about [...]
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The long rains are ending in Kenya, and Shela village, the tiny outpost of Islamic fundamentalism and Eurotrash, is open for business. Blinking like a naked mole rat in the sun, I awkwardly greet people I didn’t remember that I knew, often feeling surprisingly warm toward them. Intimate conversations spring up like volunteer plants; unexpected [...]
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If California could stop drilling off its coast, why can’t Louisiana even manage to collect taxes from the oil behemoths ruining their fishing industry. Maybe it’s time to hold the people of Louisiana responsible for selling their state to oil companies and getting so little in return.
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Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d’être violent et original dans vos œuvres. This advice from Flaubert has been translated as: Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work. I’m fonder of the punchier version that reads: [...]
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