Nathanael West

He was not to know that when one night she had laughed for five minutes on end without any provocation or anything particular to laugh at, she had lost the last of her mind.

It made his fists clench and his heart pound. Every night when he went to bed he could hear the echo of those steps in his ears.

He already had his hand on the bell when the little man opened the door wide. The stranger blinked his long, dark lashes, trying to hold back the triumph in his eyes.

He was the manager of the highest priced whorehouse in the city of Los Angeles. The woman turned to Todd and said in a soft voice, 'Charlie thought your name was Ned Beaumont.'

Already he was taking on the semblance of a man dressed in a bearskin trying to act like a house pet.

Her beauty was cool as ice, as though she were a woman who had never known desire.

He was black, had blue gums as thin as petals, legs in the shape of bones without flesh, and the slow, painful walk of a crippled dog.

The hot pavements bent and shimmered with the reflections of flames. The streetlights took on the wavy, elongated shapes of luminous insects.

They were trapped, immobilized, fighting madly against the bars of the cage in which they were confined.

Behind him rose the wall of the movie theatre, a wall encrusted with the cement outlines of hands and feet, left there by stars who had been asked to contribute the imprint of their features to the building.

The pain persisted. He was nauseated by the sound of their laughter, as though it were some kind of high-pitched, electronic device like a dentist's drill, going on and on.

He hated the color scheme of its badly proportioned brickportico and the imitation pilasters that supported the damp surface of the flat roof.