I’m thinking of traveling to Berlin to visit Helene Hegemann, the 19-year-old best-selling German author who almost won the Leipzig Book Fair prize, despite the fact that she freely admitted to lifting whole sections from other sources and who was written up (with proper acknowledgements) by Nicholas Kulish in the New York Times.
It wasn’t just the murder which brought her here to the place her parents could never stop talking about, the place they had left, their hearts almost irretrievably broken when they were forced to leave their family and homeland.
When Solange, Miguel and I shared a chocolate dessert in Quito and spoke together, two of us in broken tongues, and my beautiful and self-confident daughter in two seamless languages, I knew my experiment in international living had been successful.
Was Mitch McConnell channeling Tammy Wynette last week? “Stand by Your Man” seemed to be the theme song of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. If you love him, you will be proud of him, because “after all, he’s just a man.”
It was 5:20 AM Sunday and someone was banging on the door at my grandmother’s house in Beloit, Wisconsin, where I had come for a weekend respite from college. I stumbled out of bed with my slit eyes, grumbling to myself about inconsiderate people who don’t have the sense to let others get some much-needed sleep.
I wondered if I should mention to her she ought to lose those pounds she’s added recently. HR will just give me that sob story about how she’s going through hard times since her husband died. Or was it her husband and her son? Some car accident. Or maybe mountain climbing. But why is that MY problem?
I was at a dinner party last week and sat next to a man from Bhutan, who had recently moved here for a six-month assignment at The Hodge Conjecture Think Tank in Flatbush.
We have read your exhaustive and exhausting manuscript for the novel “Silas Marner” and we regretfully decline its publication. There are problems two numerous to enumerate in this shortly letter, but I feel it my duty as editorial spokesman to correct your literative and grammatical mistakes.
A play based on Ovid’s story of Narccissus’s mother, Liriope, who asks a wise man if her son would grow old and he replied, “Yes, if he never knows himself.”
He stands on goals and does not waver / Ordering layoffs without disdain / Never caring results bring pain / Only gloating at profits to savor.
