They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving.

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.

I think that if people are instructed about anything, it should be about the nature of cruelty. And about why people behave so cruelly to each other. And what kind of satisfactions they derive from it. And why there is always a cost, and a price to be paid.

Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?

America has always been a nation of small places, and as we lose them, we're losing part of ourselves.

I get and read an enormous number of first novels.

And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.