It's harder than you realize, being American," he told her. "Don't suppose we aren't aware how we appear to the rest of the world. Times I used to travel abroad, I'd see those tour groups of my countrymen and flinch, even though I knew I looked pretty much the same. That's the hell of it: we're all lumped in together. We're all on this same big ship, so to speak, and wherever the ship goes I have to go, even if it's behaving like some. . . grade-school bully. It's not as if I can just jump overboard, you know!"
"Whereas we Iranians, on the other hand," Maryam said wryly, "are invariably perceived as our unique and separate selves."
--Anne Tyler, Digging to America
A bang, not a whimper
Two months into L.'s retirement, and I'm finished with the stockpiling of books. No more book purchases! Or at least, no purcha...
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(See also Musee des Beaux Arts ) As far as mental anguish goes, the old painters were no fools. They understood how the mind, the freakiest ...
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When I finished Kevin Brockmeier's A Brief History of the Dead last spring I immediately did a search to see if the Coca-Cola Corp. had...
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