Crying was like pissing everything out on the ground.

In the stutter-flashes of light, the clouds look like huge transparent brains filled with bad thoughts.

"You need hedges.""Hedges," I said, bemused. "Yes, Edgar." He looked surprised and a little disappointed, as if I had failed to understand a very simple concept. "Hedges against the night."

Paul LePage has become a terrible embarrassment to the state I live in and love. If he won't govern, he should resign.

A change is as good as a rest.

In a brilliant fusion of fact and fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips has written the novel of the year. It's the story of a serial killer's crimes and capture, yes, but it's also a compulsively readable story of how one brave woman faces up to acts of terrible violence in order to create something good and strong in the aftermath. Quiet Dell will be compared to In Cold Blood, but Phillips offers something Capote could not: a heroine who lights up the dark places and gives us hope in our humanity.

A cowardly leader is the most dangerous of men.