Imagine the whoosh of a lifted arm, or the terrible racket atoms get to when you make a fist.

Later, in the house, he said: “Wait around and you’ll see Ava. She does grace us from time to time.”

After reciting the secret Gory Oath — “Yeti! Betty! Netty!” — we trudged upstairs.

I’d over-painted the larynx. I’d botched the intestines. It stood to reason the penis had been spared my wrath.

Frady brought a sheaf of poems. He said the writing kept him occupied in the worst of times.

She played pretty poison to his Napoleonic airs, two dandies in Manhattan. Off they went to Paris.

The air force man lived alone in a mossy apartment that smelled of the aging miscellany of unkempt fruit.

Imagine a Polish pope wearing a miner's hardhat. But no, popes don't do that. Can't happen.

In Rome, irresponsibility and opportunism are interchangeable.

“Sorry” and “worry” are words about honor (and feelings) that the male lexicon dismisses as vulnerable.

The gut root of the detestation was not Ahmadinejad’s views on Israel, nuclear weapons, gays, or the Holocaust.