You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children’s books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife’s work in a well-known...

The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.

But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind...

Wasn’t the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn’t have to wear a tie?

That’s an old person’s word,” said Ethan.

Yes. The Holocaust.

Dennis was present, still present, and this, she thought as she stayed landed against him, was no small talent.

The students lurked on the edges of their teachers’ lives for years, and brought bulletins from their own lives, which over time began to include lovers, ambitions, an upward trajectory.

If someone said ‘diametrically,’ could ‘opposed’ be far behind?

Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to...

It wasn’t easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you. If those two people were still accessible to you, if they called you all the time, if they asked you...

But it had no doubt sprung from true emotion, for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.

The mystery of desire was way beyond the conceptual abilities of Jules Jacobson. It was like … robotics. Just another subject that she couldn’t understand at all.

Jules told them, “I used to be a camper here myself,” but she was confronted with a squeal of feedback, and even when she repeated her words, she saw that it didn’t matter to them...

People are always saying these things about how there’s no need to read literature anymore-that it won’t help the world. Everyone should apparently learn to speak Mandarin, and learn how to write code for computers....

Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star…

…because when you’re young, you don’t really believe you’ll ever be anything other than young.

We had a good marriage,” he said. “I just thought it would be so much longer.” Then he shrugged, and coughed away a sob, this thin man in his sixties with the soft androgynous face...

But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up,...

New teachers were just a part of life, for a few days after one arrived, squawks of interest were emitted from various corners, but then they died away as the teacher was absorbed like everyone...

…oh boo hoo, everyone’s life was hard, and if you’d survived the hardship, why write about it? Survival itself was enough.

We are so, so fucked,” Jules finally said…

People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.

After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.

But here was where the question of talent became slippery, for who could say whether Spirit-in-the-Woods had ever pulled incipient talent out of a kid and activated it, or whether the talent had been there...

You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the...

Soon, she and the rest of them would be ironic much of the time, unable to answer an innocent question without giving their words a snide little adjustment. Fairly soon after that, the snideness would...

I always thought talent was everything, but maybe it was always money. Or even class. Or if not class exactly, connections.

For while they’d stayed close during the absurd years of his sharp rise, having children had knocked it all into a different arrangement. The minute you had children you closed ranks. You didn’t plan this...

But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.

She understood that it had never just been about talent: it had also always been about money. Ethan was brilliant at what he did, and he might well have made it even if Ash’s father...

The minute you had kids you closed ranks. You didn’t plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock...

Jealousy was essentially “I want what you have,” while envy was “I want what you have, but I also want to take it away so you can’t have it.

Twitter,” said Manny, waving his hand. “You know what that is? Termites with microphones.

Well,” said Ash, and she got out of her own bed and came to sit beside Jules. “I’ve always sort of felt that you prepare yourself over the course of your whole life for the...