Leads de Stein

Question 1

The first time I saw him he couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old, a little ferret of a kid,
sharp and quick. Sammy Glick. Used to run copy for me. Always ran. Always looked thirsty.

Answer 1

x

Question 2

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five
travelers into the gulf below.

Answer 2

x

Question 3

Yank Lucas fell asleep late one night and left the gas burning on the kitchen range.

Answer 3

x

Question 4

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

Answer 4

x

Question 5

She might have been waiting for her lover.

Answer 5

x

Question 6

“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.”

Answer 6

x

Question 7

The pass was high and wide and he jumped for it, feeling it slap flatly against his hands, as he shook his hips to throw off the halfback who was diving at him.

Answer 7

x

Question 8

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced the archbishop had come to see me.

Answer 8

x

Question 9

On the day he lost his right foot, Walter Van Brunt had been haunted, however haphazardly, by ghosts of the past.

Answer 9

x

Question 10

When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow.

Answer 10

x

Question 11

What made me take this trip to Africa?

Answer 11

x

Question 12

If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Answer 12

x

Question 13

Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers.

Answer 13

x

Question 14

I wanted to strangle mother but I’d have to touch her to do it.

Answer 14

x

Question 15

It would have been nice if the stork had dropped me down the right chimney.

Answer 15

x

Question 16

A telephone ringing in the middle of the night is not a welcome sound.

Answer 16

x

Question 17

My name is Johnny Hake. I’m thirty-six years old, stand five feet eleven in my socks, weigh one hundred and forty-two pounds stripped, and am, so to speak, naked at the moment and talking into the dark. I was conceived in the Hotel St. Regis, born in the Presbyterian Hospital, raised on Sutton Place, christened and confirmed in St. Bartholomew’s, and I drilled with the Knickerbocker Greys, played football and baseball in Central Park, learned to chin myself on the framework of East Side apartment-house canopies, and met my wife (Christina Lewis) at one of those big cotillions at the Waldorf. I served four years in the Navy, have four kids now, and live in a banlieue called Shady Hill. We have a nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking meat, and on summer nights, sitting there with the kids and looking into the front of Christina’s dress as she bends over to salt the steaks, or just gazing at the lights in Heaven, I am thrilled by more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is what is meant by the pain and sweetness of life.

Answer 17

x

Question 18

When she was home from her boarding school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annex. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I didn’t like. When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M. I saw her several times outside too. I stood right behind her once in a queue at the public library down Crossfield Street. She didn’t look once at me, but I watched the back of her head and her hair in a long pigtail. It was very pale, silky, like Burnet cocoons. All in one pigtail coming down almost to her waist, sometimes in front, sometimes at the back. Sometimes she wore it up. Only once, before she came to be my guest here, did I have the privilege to see her with it loose and it took my breath away it was so beautiful, like a mermaid.

Answer 18

x

Question 19

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Answer 19

x

Question 20

Here on a stony meadow in West Texas at the end of 10 miles of unpaved road through mesquitecovered, coyote-infested shrub land, several hundred bearers of a strategic commodity of the United States of America are gathered. They are goats.

Answer 20

x

Question 21

An 87-year-old water main ruptured outside of Grand Central Terminal just before the morning rush hour yesterday, unleashing a deluge that ruined a newly renovated subway station and plunged commuters into a snarl of flooded subway lines and pulverized asphalt. The 20-inch main, which runs east and west along 42d Street between Park and Lexington Avenue, broke at about 5:45 A.M. Water surged upward, heaving 42d Street into a small mountain range, then cascaded down staircases and ventilation grates like so many waterfalls, flooding the subway tracks below. The repair process was delayed for hours because the city’s Environmental Protection Department misidentified the site of the rupture and mistakenly shut off the wrong main.

Answer 21

x

Question 22

As the 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling city today, exploding into buildings all around, a disheveled stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a plastic chair in the middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his cello from its case and began playing Albinoni’s Adagio.

Answer 22

x

Question 23

Yesterday morning Henry Sorbino walked into the K-Mart on Eleventh Street carrying an umbrella and walked out carrying an umbrella and someone else’s purse.

Answer 23

x

Question 24

At exactly 10:19 a.m. yesterday, a grandmother’s purse on a conveyor belt at Orange County airport set off an alarm that caused two security guards to rush to the scene.

Answer 24

x

Question 25

Carl Gardhof, his head held high as if he had done nothing wrong, was sentenced in Superior Court to eighteen months in jail this morning.

Answer 25

x

Question 26

Carl Gardhof, who had trouble keeping his eyes on the judge, was sentenced in Superior Court to six months in jail this morning for his fourth conviction of flashing in public.

Answer 26

x

Question 27

Since learning last year that he had multiple sclerosis, Andy Torok has become less and less steady on his feet, and his worries have accumulated along with the hand prints on his apartment’s white walls.

Answer 27

x

Question 28

It is nearly 10 p.m. and the toll taker at the Triborough Bridge’s Manhattan Plaza is near the end of her shift. Her routine is methodical, icily efficient. She glances out the window to see the kind and size of vehicle approaching. She then pushes a button to electronically post the fare on a display screen. In a practiced movement, she reaches out for money. She hands back a token or change. She does this 300 times an hour, three seconds a car, an endless stream of stop-and-go. Such are the labors of one of life’s invisible people, a toll taker for the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which last year collected $653.6 million from 277 million vehicles. This particular transaction is recorded in grainy black-and-white images on a jerky surveillance video tape. The woman, who officials would not name, is about to become a statistic, one of 26 Bridge and Tunnel officers to be robbed at gunpoint this year, already three times the number in all 1992. A black car stops. A man in a ski mask thrusts a sawed-off shotgun through his window. As quickly as the human mind can perceive and respond, the toll taker shoves a trayful of money into his hands. The car lurches into the darkness.

Answer 28

x

Question 29

As any serious migraine sufferer knows, an attack can bring pain without pity or horizon, a pain so stupendous that it obliterates work, family, thought, otherness. Yet for all its galactic sweep when it strikes, migraine is a mundane and commonplace ailment, afflicting about 12 percent of the population. It is a trait passed along from parent to offspring with the seeming ease of wispy hair or nearsightedness: three-quarters of all sufferers are thought to have an inherited predisposition to the disorder.

Answer 29

x

Question 30

Andy Warhol, draftsman of shoes, is dead, and the people viewing his remains are mostly wearing scuffed white sneakers.

Answer 30

x

Question 31

A year after his death, the recurring image I associate with Raymond Carver is one of people leaning toward him, working very hard at the act of listening.

Answer 31

x

Question 32

At the Academy Awards, the entrance to the Shrine Civil Auditorium is flanked by four giant Oscars quite, or so it seems to me, like sullen art deco Nazis.

Answer 32

x

Question 33

I’m talking to my friend Kit Herman when I notice a barely perceptible spot on the left side of his face.

Answer 33

x

Question 34

So much of a writer’s life consists of assumed suffering, rhetorical suffering, that I felt something like relief, even elation, when the doctor told me that I had cancer of the prostate.

Answer 34

x

Question 35

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent …

Answer 35

x

Question 36

The two most successful creations of American movies are the gangster and the Westerner: men with guns.

Answer 36

x

Question 37

Many problems confront an autobiographer, and I am confident that I have not solved them.

Answer 37

x

Question 38

I see no reason why the reader should be interested in my private life.

Answer 38

x

Question 39

From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a “sight” for the village. I took this to mean that people of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people are always something of a “sight” outside of the city. It did not occur to me—possibly because I am an American—that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro.

Answer 39

x

Question 40

Children, those energetic dervishes, are too busy testing themselves against the world to know the meaning of boredom for very long; high adventure waits for them in every breakable object. It is in adolescence that boredom, time without life, insinuates itself into each passing day. But the adolescent with a good mind and a university education to acquire may wait until he is 24 or more before life begins to pall. That is precisely the age at which Peter Fleming, in 1932, answered an advertisement.

Answer 40

x