Ondaatje, De Lillo, Pynchon.
Jim Shephard's Love and Hydrogen:
They lived on mustard sandwiches, boiled kale, and turnip mash. Gnüss's most cherished toy for a year and a half was a clothespin on which his father had painted a face. They're ecstatic to have found positions like this. Their work fills them with elation, and the kind of spuriously proprietary pride that mortal tour guides might feel on Olympus. Meals that seem giddily baronial—plates crowded with sausages, tureens of soup, platters of venison or trout or buttered potatoes—appear daily, once the passengers have been served, courtesy of Luftschiffbau Zeppelin.
in The Best Short American Stories of 2002, also in Shephard's second, soon-to-be-published, short story collection of the same namewhy doesn't anybody talk about Paul West?
