John Kennedy Toole’s Hot-Dog Carts
'Going to New Orleans after a fresh reading of A Confederacy of Dunces gives the city a different flavour. Every sign begins to read like a knowing wink.'
Fiction
Becoming Westerly
'It’s funny how the ocean calls out to you. It’s not about checking wave cams on the Internet, or reading the surf forecast. It’s a feeling in your bones and blood, something like the way dogs sense earthquakes.'
What Was It Like? I’ll Tell You
'He sipped like a hummingbird drinking dew from a curled leaf; his face was long enough to wrap twice around his neck.'
The Collected ‘Maxims’ of W.G. Sebald
'He had weary eyes that made it tempting to identify him with the melancholy narrators of his books, but he also had a gentle amiability and wry sense of humour.'
Eleven Orphaned Short-Story Openings (circa 1996–2012) Looking for a Loving Home
'She came to us from Kansas City with smoke in her habit, shorn hair glinting copper. She came with her guitar and her firm belief in penance and her expertise in all things eschatological.'
Five Short Stories
A Story of Stolen Salamis My son’s Italian landlord in Brooklyn kept a shed out back in which he cured...
I Knew Nothing
Part 1. 'I have at last rejected the notion that I grasp even the basics of life, of society, or the laws of the natural world, the workings of business, or even the grammar of my native language.'
Give It Up
'I try to guess the book’s big idea and decide, well in advance of criticism or comprehension, whether or not the writing will be rich enough to entertain my friends when they ask, "Read anything good lately?"'
The Fantastications
'Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books. When I got home, I immersed myself in Southern fiction.'
‘It was like a ten-year stag party’
'Maths and numbers and abstraction, these all seem like very un-Irish things; but imagining other worlds, turning reality into a hall of mirrors, these are things we are very good at.'
A Far Cry From Kensington
‘Can you decide to think? – Yes, you can. You can put your mind to anything most of the...
Scots Pine (A Valediction Forbidding Mourning)
'Isn’t the Scots pine the loneliest tree in the world? I said. Look at it, look at that one there, standing so mournful, and apart, and dour, and elegiac. Scottish to its roots.'