I stop Faulkner, ask what a maggot feels like when he holds it in his hand. "If it’s a blowfly maggot and it’s alive, it feels pretty sturdy. They’re resilient. They are soft. They’re not warm.”

As a teenager, I dismissed adults’ dismissal of the new with the thought that these grown-ups (who also hated Elvis and despised Jerry Lee) merely preferred elevator music for canvas, eye Muzak.

Pete tells Wayne about survival food, the bazooka. Wayne rubs his brow with an Amtrak napkin. Pete says that one night, in Detroit, when he’d smoked too much crack— ‘‘You guys know crack?” he asks and we nod obediently.

I doubt any of you who grew up with brothers and sisters can easily imagine how intensely the only child (even as an adult) looks forward to his lunch or squash game with you.

The WELL evolved from the back-to-the-land utopianism that produced Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, and Brand, who writes on The WELL as SBB, was one of the system's founders and developers.

Five feet 4 inches in height, 120 pounds when he “got his full growth,” Victor Krulak was dubbed “Brute” by his fellow cadets at Annapolis. The nickname stuck. The now-77-year-old retired marine Lt. Gen. Krulak …

At 75 he still mourned his mother. He dreamed about her often. Stood, like Babar, in the window, remembered her. Saw her in her coffin. Dreamed of my mother. The house we’d lived in.

Early in the couple’s marriage, Ellen made Vincent promise that he would see to it that she died in her own bed next to him and not among strangers. Whether this promise will be kept drives Gordon’s novel.

Tidying shelves as we walk past poetry — Auden. Berryman. Chaucer, Cicero, Coleridge. Dante. De La Mare. Dickinson, Donne — Chuck, Jr., smiles, asks. "Do you know how many pressed flowers we find in books?"

Sandy and a girlfriend had gone into a liquor store, robbed the clerk, They locked the clerk in a walk-in cooler. Sandy started feeling bad about the guy. She went back and let him out.

Back in the U.S., Bryson borrowed his mother’s Chevrolet Chevette and set out upon a 38-state quest to find one town that is “an amalgam” of all the towns he'd encountered in movies

“Ray Bradbury,” Brizzolara continued, “talking about detective fiction set in California, described it as ‘the literature of sadness and strange endings on the California coast.’ And this has always made sense to me.

Veteran Readers The first three Vietnam Vets whom I asked, "What novels about the Vietnam War have you read?" hadn't read many. All three served in the Marine Corps, all were in boot camp in …

He thinks about San Diego “all the time. Whenever I eat an avocado, every time I buy an Hawaiian shirt, when I feel physically comfortable — because I often felt comfortable in San Diego."

Jim Harrell makes a fist. Shows a brown hump of knuckle. How the fist feels is hard. It’s not as big as a breadbox, but pretty near the size of a pound round loaf of …

The Southwest was Paradise Lost. California was Paradise Regained, an alter-Eden. From rutted, dustblown land outside Tulsa, Little Rock, and Topeka, California appeared epic and opulent: orange groves, vineyards, an eternal now of seasonless calm. Just to dig your heels into El Centro, into Bakersfield soil could change your life, turn your luck.

“I sat there for 30 minutes. No one helped. Finally, some guy comes along in a pickup, Confederate flags all over the windshield. He stops, gets out, says, ‘Let me see if I can help you.’"

"I begin to see that this [U.S. involvement in Vietnam] was not cool, and I shared that with my father and we had a parting of the way. But not for long. He came around."

The camps published weekly newspapers — Migratory Clipper, Pea Pickers Prairie, The Tow Sack Tattler. Beneath the disclaimer, “Neither the Farm Security Administration, nor its employees accept ‘Editorial Responsibility,’ the papers were written and edited by the migrants and typed onto stencils and mimeographed.

Molly, my friend Jerry's cocker spaniel, met me on the patio. Blond Molly wagged her stub of a tail, jumped up, danced, rolled onto her back. I petted her warm stomach. She turned to her …

A few days earlier, says Brother David, a man living in Arenales “got killed on the other side,” in the U.S. The man was rumored to have supported his family by going across the border and robbing houses.

Outside Abercrombie and Fitch, a blond surfer — tanned Alex — waggled fur-lined boots a plaid Pendleton scarf, fur-lined leather gloves He snarled. “I don't feel the need to these in Southern California. They’re going back to the store.”

AS 1939 OPENS... Worldwide depression with full employment only in Germany. Hitler came to power in 1933. Since 1935 Jews in Germany have been stripped of property and basic civil rights. By 1937 129,000 — …

She sighs. “But I can wear jeans and a slobbed-out shirt, and if my nails are painted, I feel glamorous." She lifts her glance from my fingers to my eyes. “You know what I mean?”

An August Sunday afternoon, lemonade weather. Leaves drooped on Balboa Park's giant eucalyptus. The Home States picnic, an annual event of America's Finest City Week, sponsored by the San Diego Junior Chamber of Commerce, drew …

The two-story Children’s Hospital Center (or Child Protection sits at one edge of the Children’s Hospital campus on Kearny Mesa. Walking through the center’s first-floor hallway, a visitor finds gaily painted rooms furnished with child-size …

"My room, it’s eight-by-twelve at the most. I took a small room — sixty-five a week. There was a bed in it, a table, no chest of drawers, no closet. Not as large as a jail cell.”

Years pass, winters, Watergate. Five o’clock stubble shadows the jowls. I hear from my mother that the piano teacher had a “nervous breakdown.” We’re slow-dancing at the Elks Club to Frankie Valli’s “My Eyes Adored You.”

“The first thing we have here by you at the desk in the pet cemetery office is the box of Kleenex,” says Velma Matthews. “That means, ‘We offer you our sympathy.’ The Kleenex is used …

Aurore and Ethel Lee await their turn in the shuffleboard tourney. In the winter of life, they sit, legs crossed at ankles, on folding chairs at a card table. The skin on the tops of …

We stood outside her Mission Hills home. She nodded toward a two-story house half a block uphill and said, "That was my father’s house." She led the way down stone steps set into a steep …

Let’s say you and I, we’re dealing dope. We argue over price. Say I’m a 300-pounder. You put a knife into me and kill me — unjustifiably. I’m sitting there on your sofa, a 300-pound …

We are looking at old photographs. There is the rundown frame house in Lowgap, North Carolina, where Charles, born in 1949, lived for three years. Next in the stack is Charles’s first school picture: blond …

Rumor will have it that I am at work on a novel set in the town. It will be said, “She has been a cross, God knows.” “He has not, you know, worn himself out, carrying it.”

When Sunday school was over, I said, to no one in particular, “I have to go downstairs to church to meet my parents.” It wasn’t true. It just felt good to say it. I like …

For Cookie, Cha-Cha, Cindy, Mary, Carol, Jean, Nita, and pregnant Connie, the San Diego Zoological Society’s first Asian elephant mother-to-be, it was just another elephant day at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Soon after …

Horton Plaza floats in the downtown landscape: disconcerting, surreal, a dream painted some forty-nine colors. Open almost two years, the $140 million, six-and-a-half-block shopping center-entertainment complex houses four major department stores, 150 specialty shops, eateries, …

We sat in an office in his church in Santee. It was a weekday morning. Phones rang. Children could be heard singing in the student church school. Men and women returned, sunburned, from picketing an …

“So, why you want to write about a pimp, girl?” “I need money.” We’d met through a friend of a friend of an acquaintance of a friend. He was 31 years old and had been …

As Judith Wilson opens the front door of her Chula Vista home, a minuscule Yorkshire terrier barks and runs to her side. Next to Wilson, the terrier seems big as a Great Dane. Wearing a …

"I've come down here every morning for twenty-seven years. To this day, I like it. My wife comes in every afternoon. She’s the soup maker and waitress. Only once, for two days, that’s the longest …

Much of American's WASP middle class was once landless and powerless and poor. Risen out of that, they want only to put it behind them and forget, and put aside the constant fear of falling back.

On a Monday morning in midsummer, shortly after 8:30, I went to the office of the city’s Street Youth Program in Southeast San Diego. Ben Tukufu and Richard “Liko” Davis, two of the counselors in …

It was a little after noon on a Wednesday in midsummer. Ben Tukufu paced tight circles in front of a blackboard set up in the auditorium of the Neighborhood House Association in Southeast San Diego. …

Sherover learned to shoot, meeting for target practice every Saturday afternoon, and she and several other students asked a nonstudent friend if he would sit in Marcuse’s large survey courses with a gun, “just in case.” He did.

On most summer mornings, Sandi is up by ten thirty. She watches Three’s Company and her soaps. While she watches, she sits in the family room and eats. Usually she puts some frozen French fries in the oven.

Just before one on Friday afternoon, members of Masjidul-Taqwa, a Muslim mosque or masjid, are parking their cars along the 2500 block of Imperial Avenue. The women's heads are wrapped, turban-style, in colors and patterns …

Wednesday morning, nine o’clock, a dozen men and women, alone and in couples, entered through the glass doors of the Senior Citizens Services office in city hall at 202 C Street. All were neatly and …

1945 JANUARY January 6, 1945: Ten-year-old Elvis Presley goes shopping with his mother, Gladys, and buys his first guitar. It costs $7.75. Pentecostal Holiness preacher Oral Roberts, twenty-six, has just ended his three-year Shawnee, Oklahoma, …

A lone man paces back and forth in front of a covey of lighted motor homes and house trailers assembled in College Grove Center’s parking lot. He is clutching his jacket tightly around his neck …