Why do fathers look ungainly in their daughter's bedrooms? Like mythical beasts wandered in from the forest of another world?

Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire

It was a fever, a hot rage of words.

The trouble began when my 6-year-old son, Z, became obsessed with Michael Jackson.

Because all of us are so ready to talk about the world we live in. We are ready to have a publishing industry that is of that world.

Mindy Lujan with her feathered hair, bullying blue-lined eyes, and potty mouth that rivaled Akhil's, managing to use fuck as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, often in the same sentence, as in, "Who the fuck does that fucking fuck think she's fucking with?

Somehow, all the talk about tenure and anthropology had given her visions of a thick-walled, libraried adobe, the kind of place that was covered with kilim rugs and fertility sculptures. The white stucco in front of her looked only slightly more substantial than a roadside weigh station.

An hour later, Amina stood at a pay phone in a mall hallway, where poop and perfume and the grease from the food court formed the kind of atmosphere you might find in Jupiter's red spot

Why is it that fathers so often ensure the outcome they are trying to avoid? Is their need to dominate so much stronger than their instinct to protect? Did Thomas know, Amina wondered as she watched him, that he had just done the human equivalent of a lion sinking his teeth into his own cub?

Nobody likes these things life hands us. But part of becoming a man is understanding how to face them head on instead of running all the time. It's time you learned how to do that.