Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.

I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It's a devastating novel.

So it was scary, but that's how it goes. To my great delight, I discovered that it did all belong.

Never say love is "like" anything... It isn't.

Rueful, bittersweet, funny, written with tenderness and bite, Merrill Feitell's stories, like so many classic short stories, are made from the plain and painful stuff of this world, and haunted by the possibility, and the impossibility, of a better one.

Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.

Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature and one of only three now writing whose work makes me truly happy to be a reader.