David Shields: Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.

In the summer of

Liking the world is not easy, though sometimes it is / a large wave that carries you.

Gene is fluent in Klingon, comfortable even with the tricky irregular conjugations of the stative verbs

Please go read the reviews for this movie on The Onion, the pissant caboodle that now passes for Roger Ebert.com, and Ain’t It Cool News, yeah, them too, for some reason.

At first sight the line, nearly invisible but sometimes catching a ray of sun through the clinging water droplets, ran parallel to the brown water’s surface, from the tip of the pole held by the fisherman standing in the shallows out to unknown depths.

The donkey got loose at about noon. 

The weekend in Portland, Oregon, had been our first vacation without kids in almost five years, and I'd had this vision that my wife and I would feel unshackled and adventuresome again.

But you know, all of us prose writers in the United States have to deal with the shadow he casts and the work he left behind.

Roxana and Robert are in therapy because they argue: about the baby, about the laundry, about therapy, and about therapy, too.

One morning I wake up and there are over thirty new texts on my phone, all from him. While I was sleeping, we got into an argument, made up, and then started fighting again, all without my knowledge or participation. Right now he is breaking up with me.

let’s start with my most pressing question, one you haven’t answered IRL: WHY DID YOU TURN DOWN BRAD LISTI?

Simon Pegg would kill for a beer. Will. Has. Is. Over and over again. An hour into The World's End, halfway through a pub crawl he's been waiting twenty years to finish, he engages in a beautifully

Before, the possums’ noise had been an angry hissing, but now their voices were becoming sweet, even musical, the world of them trilling and humming into their endless, private night.

The rent-paying, however, would be largely theoretical: his savings long since spent, he would be using the money she and her husband endlessly credited him without interest

“My son was murdered last year. His bride murdered him.”

Hmmm... When Butcher Bear was murdered, he was probably cutting meat.

You can’t ban my books for saying this shit because no one bought them anyway. Some guys have all the luck. 

In the end, there are five bear cubs underneath your porch. You name them after U.S. Presidents. Taft dies of starvation.

How they say something doesn’t wink at an audience, this caws its eyelids off. What we got? Mad Men? True Detective? Those shows are about acting. (Sometimes about writing in service of plot. Oh, True Detective, almost, so close until the final explanation cribs us all.)

I wake up in a wheelchair. I wake up on display. 

Where the fuck are the collected plays of Ron Allen? The police have won, that’s where.

It is April 2^nd, 2014. I tell me I told us. I’m happier. The fourth sentence is treating it like home. Our cats are brothers with dichromatic eyes. 

I had my bags packed and was getting ready to leave with two insane-seeming girls who offered me sex in exchange for a ride to Cleveland when a few patients stopped me and essentially pushed me into the lecture hall. I don't know why I didn't put up more of a fight -

I googled “Karl Ove Knausgaard AND Nicholson Baker” and didn’t find much. A review of My Struggle from The Monthly, an Australian magazine, compared some of Knaugaard’s reflections to “Seinfeld’s

I remember Marc said, you’re wet just because of the humidity.

Can you teach an eighteen-year-old trauma?