Royalty mostly seem like members of some anachronistic faith, like the Amish, peculiar in gilded buggies.

'The Girls,' by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada.

I don't know if my faith stems from what I'd call unconditional love, but the energy certainly feels boundless.

Readers, like writers, are essentially amoral. Arm's length will never do. We want to get closer.

You can conclude from the glossy surfaces of 'The L Word' that L stands for latte or Lexus and stop there. Or you can notice that in some of its less flashy moments, the show has staked a claim on Large - as in a larger, denser, more ambivalent imaginary world, populated by imperfect and riveting citizens of all sexual stripes.

I was influenced by big, strong voices - writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.