Let’s talk about rape for a moment. Rape is not what George Lucas did to your childhood. Rape is not what happens when a sports team beats another sports team by a wide margin. Rape is not what happens when your electric bill is higher this month t...
The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in ...
How about a little teaser from CROWN OF ICE? Thyra Winther, the current Snow Queen speaks about her "home": At night the palace’s crystal halls are tinged sapphire. One of the first bits of magic that Voss taught me was to set the carved walls alig...
The famous courtesan Clarimonde died recently, as the result of an orgy which lasted eight days and eight nights. It was something infernally magnificent. They revived the abominations of the feasts of Belshazzar and Cleopatra. Great God! what an age...
It was long before I could believe that human learning had no clear answer to this question. For a long time it seemed to me, as I listened to the gravity and seriousness wherewith Science affirmed its positions on matters unconnected with the proble...
There's this party tomorrow night. The client with all the ex-husbands is throwing it, and I've got to go. I know it's last minute, and that Fridays are really busy for you. I'm also sure it's going to be boring. Anyway, if you can't go, I completely...
On No Work of Words On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft: To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given Puffing the pounds...
If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the pe...
Gabe watched, holding his breath as the figure slowly turned. The body moved in an almost unnatural way as it shifted and crawled slowly on all fours across the floor. When the candlelight at last fell on the figure, Gabe could make out the auburn ha...
What - what was I doing the whole time?" So much for Alis's warning. Lucien let out a sharp breath, running a hand through his red hair. "He had you dance for him for most of the night. And when you weren't dancing, you were sitting in his lap." "Wha...
His action of joining them, which would have been rude in a restaurant that was not moving at three hundred kilometers an hour, was perfectly acceptable on a train, which mimicked the entirely random joinings of life but revealed their true nature by...
I woke up this morning with the words clomping around in my head: 'Truth does not become wisdom until the exact moment you're ready for it. No one can force it on you, even though everyone thinks they have a right to try. So the rest of us should jus...
Well, in a world where so few of us are obliged to cook at all anymore, to choose to do so is to lodge a protest against specialization—against the total rationalization of life. Against the infiltration of commercial interests into every last cran...
She was not suicidal; that is what people never managed to grasp. Cutting relieved the pressure and stood as some enduring demonstration of her emotion, some way to be in control of a body that could toss her about with seizures. It was borderline ar...
But to be a parent is to live in the past-present-future all at once. It is to hug your children and be intensely aware of how much smaller they felt last year ... even as you wonder how much bigger they will feel the next. It is to be a time-shifter...
I have been seeing dragons again. Last night, hunched on a beaver dam, one held a body like a badly held cocktail; his tail, keeping the beat of a waltz, sent a morse of ripples to my canoe. They are not richly bright but muted like dawns or the vagu...
What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously ma...
Really, awfully, terribly, I had a sudden attack of hiccups. I was staring at the Doctor, murderously angry with him. And hiccuping... 'That's it. I'm going down there. I'm offering myself to them instead. If you're too much of a coward.' The Doctor ...
It's about personal development. It's about creating your own character and pushing it to the limit. It's about pushing yourself so far out of your own and everybody else's idea of who you are and what you're capable of, that you no longer believe in...
All I do when we're apart is think about you, and all I when we're together is panic. Because every second feels so important. And because I'm so out of control, I can't help myself. I'm not even mine anymore, I'm yours, and what if you decide that y...
A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought,...
