Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities. Do you understand?

Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

In the end it all came down to companionship, to friendship, to sacrifice, to compromise.

Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around.

One of the nice things about our marriage, at least to my way of thinking, is that my wife and I no longer have to argue every thing through. We each know what the other will say, and so the saying becomes an unnecessary formality. No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we've worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily's and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding.