The Tinkerer sits in your room, sleeves rolled up, his face clenched tight as a fist. Since noon he’s been hunkered squint-eyed under a hook light, plying your larynx with a pair of tiny crescent wrenches. He pinned the skin of your throat back butterfly-style to give himself more elbow room, and now he’s fingering the pitch pipe beneath your chin. Your voice lessons didn’t go so well today.?

One of the sisters says they were robbed three times in the first town. She wants to call it three times and believes she has the right to. When they left the hotel room, someone robbed it, she says, and when they left the hotel room again, someone robbed it again. And when they stood at the desk and waved their hands at faces blank as zeros, someone robbed the room a third time. And then they rode away through the countryside like bandits run out of town although the bandits were behind them.

I would take the things that had no power of their own into my plastic play home. It was there that I pretended to be a woman. I was hungry and bored by the story of the fox and wolf.

Next door to the toilet of an apartment building on the edge of the city, in a room soggy with roof leaks and cooking vapors, lived a poor artist named Argon.

There was something sad, almost tragic about her beauty, and from the moment she opened the door and looked at him in a kind, patient way, Yakubu felt drawn to her. It was as if she had reached out and pulled him into a circle in which only he and she existed.

ONE SUMMER I STARTED OFF TO VISIT FOR THE FIRST TIME THE CITY of Los Angeles. I was riding with some friends from the University of New Mexico. On the way, we stopped off briefly to roll an old tire into the Grand Canyon. While watching the tire bounce over tall pine trees, tear hell out of a mule train, and disappear with a final grand leap into the Inner Gorge, I overheard the park ranger standing nearby say a few words about a place called Havasu, or Havasupai. A branch, it seemed, of the Grand Canyon.

I remember when I was a boy, my mother would take me to The Girls club after work. She’d drink her martinis and tell the ladies how she’d so hoped for a girl.

that there is no such thing as a feather that can help me float. Here, in the tree where you count the days, I am making a list of the things you love: circles, lines.

And he tears on with o yea and that’s right and you bitch and you shit and you you you that’s right that’s right that’s right.

Prime minister Manmohan Singh has identified Maoists as the single most serious threat to India’s national security. In the last few years, these facts have been well-circulated in news reports on India’s stability. But who are the Maoists? What do they believe?

As if in response to these words a faint moan came from the girl’s lips. Slowly she began to recover her senses. With each shuddering breath, the spider’s legs stirred as if they were alive.

States are not so much declining, failing and yielding as transforming their very nature. The network is the right metaphor to grasping the new state’s complexity.

You are quick like a monkey, running through the tree-tops, But now you will die.

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,”