About Christopher Bollen: Christopher Bollen is a novelist, journalist, and editor who lives in New York City.
All your convictions come back to mock you when you reach a certain age.
I’ve always looked like this—in between. Is there ever an age when a person looks exactly like themselves?
Art didn’t have to provide answers. It only had to ask questions.
Everyone loves a dead artist. It’s the living ones that people can’t tolerate.
She had no way of evaluating the beauty of someone so young. All young people looked beautiful to her now.
That’s what children eventually were for their aging parents: custodians of technology, free personal IT departments keeping them from disappearing forever from the universal cloud.
They were young and gay and the femininity of their teenage years had only recently hardened into the muscle of a competitive sexual economy. Their muscles met the demands of the city, and the city met the demands of their muscles.
You know how hard it is to actually touch the world? To make a mark on it? You die and they bury you in it.
Now young people have the Internet and a zillion phone apps so you don’t need an actual place to congregate. You can be everywhere, nowhere, a floating message-spewing entity. We used to rely on drugs to get that sensation.
Sometimes it seemed like the whole point of life was not to die the same death as your father.
To discover someone was ordinary always struck Mills as a kind of betrayal. Whenever a man Mills presumed was gay turned out to be straight, the aura about him crumbled, the clues reassembling into the most indistinctive brand of human being—normal...
Mills was experienced enough to understand what gay men were often forced to be in this world: romantic opportunists.
Paul needed to come out, not as gay or straight, but as human.
The Greeks used to say that gods and animals were born whole. It is only humans who need to develop, that they become complete only with the help of a community. It’s the state of that community that can turn a human into a god or a beast.” She d...
Maybe, in the end, a home is a place where you have no other choice but to stay.
If the Internet were planet Earth, the amount of space devoted to pregnancies, motherhood, infants, and toddlers would surely fill a continent. Of course, the Internet had an enormous investment in the subject: those future babies would be its next g...
They were all impatient for a kill. They wanted to fill their noses with the hot, acrid death that issued from a deer’s carcass minutes after it drew its last breath, the smell that allowed them, as men, to tremble momentarily with the sensation of...
Women had cup sizes to track their development. Men had a ruler and hope.
I’m not some outdated alarm company, like Muldoon Security, singular. I’m offering a whole new variety of services, plural—water testing, soil graphs, toxic air readings, the security of this century. The security that you aren’t being poison...
He tried to imagine the handsome couple by the refrigerator as two sweaty bodies in a bedroom, one on top of the other. Which did what to the other? Mills kept rotating the two men in his mind, which he never had to do when he imagined straight coupl...
