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Easy to deride
 / The way he stayed alive inside
 / His women with his puffed-up pride. 
/ The pharmacy supplied
 / The rising truck ladder that the fire did not provide.
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Since Portnoy’s Complaint Philip Roth has been our national chronicler of horny male vigor. Not because such characters are a constant in his work (they aren’t), but because they boast a vividness that verges, just barely, on the cartoonish. And because they are smart—and, amazingly, it helps. More…

Summer took off my glasses with a swift, practiced motion, the better to wrap her breasts around the bridge of my nose. “Can you still see okay?” . . . My view of her body was foreshortened, so that her breasts, though not large, obscured most of her slim, bare torso, down to the thighs. It is a view you get in only one other context. More…

The Internet is a compendium of broken and distorted souls: the blogs, journals, webcams, personal ads. Out there, self-exposure is no longer a niche activity, but a preoccupation that’s slowly colonizing the Internet, site by site. Let’s start with a text I recently saw online, one of 176,961 anonymous confessions currently on view at www.grouphug.us. More…