Halliday: 342 books

Sometimes I can’t remember what mom looks like. Sometimes all I can remember is her smile. Mom has only been dead a year and her face is already beginning to fade. I have to look at the pictures dad keeps on the mantle. They too are beginning to fade. There must be something wrong with me that I...

It is the landscape of Eliot and Pound. Uppers and blue pills. Snow drifts and psychiatric hospitals. Streetcars and shock treatments. A delusional young woman boards an airplane hoping to escape the horrors of this world. Some time during the flight she steps off the airplane into another world....

"The stain on the cement stared back at me. I wanted to go home and get a pail of hot water and wash it off. Several ants were grazing on it. I looked around. Everything was the same as it had been a few days earlier. The telephone booth. The newspaper boxes. The Six Points Plaza across the street....

The sixties rose out of the fifties with so much hope. Eisenhouer was gone. Kennedy was now. Wrestling was real. The Leafs were winning Stanley Cups. Television was a series of comedies about white kids in the suburbs with skin problems. Or westerns about bounty hunters, and Boot Hill, smart alec...

I don’t know how stories are supposed to end. We are in the midst of our lives, when life seems to drift on without us, fading away into the future. Nothing ends. Things dissolve into a new story, someone else’s story. What happened to Mackenzie Philips and his crazy death lock with God? Was Tom...

Charlie laughed. “I was institutionalized a few times.”“Insane asylum.”“A hospital. They say that I was wired wrong. They put me on different drugs trying to set me right. Sometimes they worked. For a while. Sometimes they didn’t work at all.”They were silent for some time.“What’s...

“Trust me, Father, God hates me. He tried to kill me when I was born. My head was too big and my mother almost died. They had to use clamps on my head but the clamps broke so they cut into my mother’s bones. It was a real mess. The doctors figured I would have brain damage. I was tested. They...

"I can hear her coming. A powerful roar from a great distance. , Her craggy pot-marked face smoking, the long tail of fog trailing behind. She will come tumbling toward us like a snowball of fire hurled by a spiteful Santa Claus. Her voice. Not soft and comforting, but a voice dripping with rage....

The moon slept in its garden. Clouds as thin as lace were tangled in the treetops. Bats flickered in and out of the high branches. Down below in the long grass the crickets were too loud. Two teeth shone like nuggets in the dirt. The headlights from the Jaguar crawled across a young woman who lay...

A life of ambition leads a great man to destroy everything around him.

“Leaving T.O. Train shivering between the rails. Wheels and rails grinding their teeth. IMPSTONE. A book of poems keeps tapping on my eyelids. Like rain on a tin roof. A commercial from Eden in Morse Code. Clattering of train. Percolates. Miles through my spine. The photo of Susan Musgrave on the...

The Exhibition is a story written like an Brueghel painting. Time turns on itself. Events are repeated and altered. Characters both dead and imaginary appear. At the core of the story is an exhibition of paintings. The paintings tell the story of the moments before, after, and surrounding the events...

There is a special place in hell for mothers. It is on Earth. Doreen Henderson lingered for months in a dark place few could understand. The psychiatrists called it post-traumatic syndrome. A young woman, the widow slipped into middle-age over night. It was as if Doreen’s world had died on her that...

Death comes in the quiet of our thoughts. When we were looking the wrong way. At the moon being smothered by a cloud. It begins in panic. Thrashing out. We want to live. Something standing over us. Waiting for our last breath. Murder. Now and then.