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Here are some article and book excerpts that, for whatever reason, I think are quite good. Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
* The correspondence columns of the Boston papers now and then suffer a sharp flurry of arithmetic on this score; indeed, for Williams to have distributed all his hits so they did nobody else any good would constitute a feat of placement unparalleled in the annals of selfishness.
The Full Glass
* I lived with my grandparents, a child lodged with old people thanks to the disruptions of the Depression, and their house had a linoleum floor and deep slate sinks in the kitchen, and above the sinks long-nosed copper faucets tinged by the green of oxidation.
Outage
* The transaction had felt flirtatious to him, and the atmosphere of the downtown, beneath its drooping festoon of useless cables, seemed festive. Automobiles paraded past with burning headlights. The ominous thickening in the air stirred the pedestrians to take shelter again. There was a brimming, an overlow of good nature, and a transparency: something occluding had been removed, baring neglected possibilities.
The Discomfort Zone
To be juggling a stick shift and a thermos of coffee when the roads were still gray and empty, to be out ahead of everyone, to see no headlights on the Pacific Coast Highway, to be the only car pulled over at Rancho del Oso State Park, to already be on site when the birds were waking up, to hear their voices in the willow thickets and the salt marsh and the meadow whose scattered oaks were draped with epiphytes, to sense the birds' collective beauty imminent and findable in there: what a pure joy this all was.
Skinny Legs and All
*At least, that was what Ellen Cherry was thinking at that moment, less than a week after the wedding, thinking, as she watched the turkey suck the thawing countryside into its windshield and blowing it its rearview mirror, that she'd been tricked.
*Colonial Pines was suburb without an urb.
*For months, Raoul had observed her moping about the Upper West Side in sneakers, paint-spattered sweatshirts, and denim skirts, unrouged lips so pendulous in their pout she could have picked pennies off the street without bending over.
The Stone Diaries
It's something to see, the way she concentrates, her hot busy face, the way she thrills to see the dish take form as she pours the stewed fruit inot the fancy mold, pressing the thickly cut bread down over the oozing juices, feeling it soften and absorb bit by bit a raspberry redness.
Empire of ice
They dumped the gravel, dumped and dumped, sculpted a six-acre rectangle out of it, then got to work on a retaining wall: more gravel -- 8,000 sacks of it weighing 13,000 pounds each -- one on top of the other, bam, bam, bam, a barrier to fight back the summer sea.
The Sun Also Rises
Sometimes he turned to smile that toothed, long-jawed, lipless smile when he was called something particularly insulting, and always the pain that any movement produced grew stronger and stronger, until finally his yellow face was parchment color, and after his second bull was dead and the throwing of bread and cushions was over, after he had saluted the President with the same wolf-jawed smile and contemptuous eyes, and handed his sword over the barrera to be wiped, and put back in its case, he passed through into the callejon and leaned on the barren below us, his head on his arms, not seeing, not hearing anything, only going through his pain.
On Being Ill
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close about our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the prescence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his "Rinse the mouth -- rinse the mouth" with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us -- when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
American Pastoral
The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating back-and-forth that all of us here grew up with, the ritual postimmigrant struggle for success turning pathological in, of all places, the gentleman farmer's castle of our superordinary Swede.
Ava's Man
The hot dog came wrapped in wax paper, the bun warm and soft, the smell of raw onions, spicy meat and chili filling the car, and she rode the rest of the way full as a tick, mustard on her cheeks.
The Year of Magical Thinking
This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.
The Winter of the Great Snows
Every new swipe of the plow hurls a gift of snow into the mouth of a driveway, so that, in effect, the plowmen, often working while we sleep snug in our beds, create a magnificent smooth, broad highway to which nobody can gain access until he has passed a private miracle of snow removal.
Pontoon
She wanted to pick it up and throw it but the angel rose and she with him and, hand in hand, they flew up into the sequined sky, the little town arranged below, all shushed and dozy, the double row of streetlights on Main Street, the red light blinking on the water tower, the dark fastness of the lake, the pinpricks of lights from houses where they all slept, the cranks, the stoics, the meek, the ragtag dreamers, the drunks, the martyred wives, and she saw a woman's pale face at a window looking for evildoers and the single pair of headlights threading the serpentine road, and after that she did not look down.
When Daddy Comes Home
He crosses his thin left leg over his right leg, adjusts his wooden cane against his side, plants his elbows on the chair's armrests and steeples his fingers.
Hell On Wheels
I’ve been traveling a lot recently, in countries ranging from developed to less developed to dear Lord, is that a monkey attacking a naked child?
The Tsar's Opponent
After days of debate, a motley pride of unlikely revolutionaries -- bearded politicos, earnest academics, and multigrained environmentalists -- collected their cigarettes and left Kasparov's apartment, divided and worn out.
Aunt Janny
Aunt Janny checked her watch, shouldered her purse, stood up slowly, and said, "Well."
Ghostbusters
But whether the collapse of the most ambitious domestic policy initiative of the (Bill) Clinton Administration is a horrid fiend, red of eye and gnarled of hand, or more of a winsome Friendly Ghost, like Casper, depends on one's point of view.
Bingo Bob's big day
Robert "Bingo Bob" Stunzig is 45. Dark sideburns frame his round face. A long mustache shadows his wide mouth. He smiles like he's up to something. A black snake tattoo coils around his left forearm; a panther prances across his right. His belly has been rounded by years of Budweiser.
This Land
The leaden clouds above hang low, as if held in drooping place by skyscraping tent poles. Their rain, misty one moment, copious the next, lacquers Seventh Avenue in a way that transforms the reflected lights into quivering spills of paint, reds and greens and blues constantly being disturbed by shooting taxicab yellows.
The Outcast
As the dishwasher churned, as his wife, Amber, lounged nearby on a leather couch wearing a tank top and sweat pants, having just come home from the gym, as the family's three dogs yapped on the patio outside and, a continent away, the year's flock of professional cyclists began their slow migration toward London for the prologue stage of the 2007 Tour de France, Floyd Landis picked up a spoon and started eating.
In a Finnish Archipelago, Memories as Sharp as a Pike’s Teeth
I followed his gaze and saw a flicker brighten the clouds from within, like a flashbulb fired behind sheets.
The final journey of Arthur Clifton
* A smile rising on her lips, she padded through the apartment.
* The oxygen machine hummed. A life's faith wavered.
* Purple blotches bloomed on his hands.
* Foy looked at him, adrift. Then she carefully waded in.
With lasers and daring, doctors race to save a young man's brain
Dr. Tulleken, gaunt and wry at 66, is a man of formidable eyebrows, and a fan of Spinoza and The New York Times Review of Books.
Exporting Democracy * On the first day, which would turn out to be the best day, the one day of all 180 days when everything actually seemed possible, the president of Yemen hadn't yet dismissively referred to an American named Robin Madrid as an old woman. * She chews gum constantly, likes jazz, likes beer, reads Anthony Trollope and misses pork. * She likes it when the staplers in the supply room are in a neat line, speaks endlessly about "transparency" and "capacity building," says that "I'm living a life I'm proud of," and every so often, when Yemen gets to her, as it inevitably gets to everyone, including Yemenis, she announces, "I'm going to be quiet for a few minutes" and shuts her door. Quarantined Although they grew up in neighbouring rurul areas in Virginia, my parents met at a diner on New York Avenue. Mama, with a caramel glow, high cheekbones that rounded her face and shoulder-length curls that softened it, found work there serving eggs and bacon after graduating from the Southampton County Training School.
A family's struggle to stay the course while one of their own is off in Iraq
* Once there, at Camp Lejeune, base to the world's largest concentration of Marines and sailors, a dad will have a short time to cement 20 years worth of son into his memory. * He's spent seven months holding pressure to bleeding bodies, plucking shrapnel, stitching flesh back together.
Onward Christian Soldier
Store fronts frown down.
What Will Become of Africa’s AIDS Orphans?
When Atsede sits down on a chair in the dirt yard under a shade tree for a rare break, the children skitter over to her and lay their heads upon her long cotton skirts or climb into her arms and nuzzle their faces into her neck.
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