Word: lucked
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...published this spring by a new writer, Melissa Bank, made the New York Times best-seller list. Another spring collection, For The Relief of Unbearable Urges, by 29-year-old Nathan Englander, has also done very well, placing among Amazon.com's top books. Older, more established writers have had luck too. Annie Proulx's newest collection of strikingly uncommercial short stories, Close Range, has sold nearly 100,000 copies. Scribner, the book's publisher, would have considered half that number a success. And at Knopf, senior editor Anne Close says short-story collections such as Lorrie Moore's Birds...
...lovely room just within my price range. I made an appointment to see the room the next day. That morning, I woke up with a pounding headache and a queasy stomach. No, it was not the result of a glorious night on the town; it was simply my bad luck. But I figured it was no problem; I'd just call them up and reschedule. So, later that afternoon, feeling much better, I phoned to ask if I could drop by and check the place out. "Oh, I'm sorry," replied the owner of the house, "the room is gone...
...think he would be, coming from the family he comes from. You'd think he'd be always concerned about safety and luck and fate. But maybe when you were J.F.K. Jr., so surrounded by tragedy, with a life so shaped by it, maybe you thought, "We've had our share. We've had more than our share. I'm going to get in a plane and fly." You can come from a place of such bad luck that you think your luck will always hold...
...vulgar to demand meaning in what may be, after all, just the piling on of bad luck arriving in bizarrely unusual clusters? We want Sophocles or Shakespeare--or, rather, in our day, tear-drenched mass-media renderings of equivalent tragedies--to broadcast inflated significances, messages from God. (We have before us the ghastly example of Diana's death and the mawkish excesses that followed.) But maybe we are merely in the presence of outrageous fortune. To my mind, standing on this beach, the Kennedys' accumulation of dooms seems as inarticulate as the boulders that the glacier left...
...wasn't until I got on the plane to Iowa that I panicked about the pitch. In a stroke of dumb luck, I found myself seated next to Matt Goeke, an 11-year-old Little League player who agreed to serve, in a limited, seated capacity, as my pitching coach. He gave me a piece of Bubble Yum, the official gum of Major League Baseball, to chew on the mound. He also drew some diagrams, mostly of a baseball and where the stitches are. "Don't try to be somebody else. Don't try to gun it. Get your...