The weekend her father left—left the house, the town, the country, everything, packing so lightly I believed he would come back—he said 'You can raise Nickie by yourself. You'll be good at it. And I had said, 'Are you on crack?' And he replied, continuing to fold a blue twill jacket, ""Yes, a little."" —Lorrie Moore 'Hey,' Paul yelled out. 'Why's everybody talking behind the patient's back?' 'Shut up, we're having sex,' she called back. She poured a cup for herself. 'He seems pretty chipper this morning.' 'Yeah, I don't know what to hope for,' I said. 'Quality, I guess. And then not too much quantity.' —David Gates 'If everything we said had been a poem, the index of first lines would have formed a pattern: 'Do you remember', 'Tell me if I remember wrong', 'There was that time', 'Wasn't it funny when' —Anne Beattie And Abeer Ayyoub, Bernard Cooper, Olivia Laing, Laura Kasischke, Thomas McGuane, Colin McAdam, Katherine Faw Morris, Melinda Moustakis, Norman Rush, Edmund White and Joy Williams