Work by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Dan Chiasson, Ruth Reichl, Roz Chast, and more

Once there was a patient in the hospital who was still feeling rather poorly, especially at night.  Part of the problem was a conversation he kept hearing through the wall, day and night.  
--From Through the Wall, a tiny book containing five stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Anna Summers and Keith Gessen (Penguin, 2011).  Three of the stories published in this Mini Modern Classic were first published in English in book form in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby (Penguin, 2009).  The remaining two stories were published for the first time in English in this collection.  Through the Wall might be a little difficult to find in the U.S.; I was lucky enough to find a used copy at Powell's City of Books in Portland, Oregon. 

Out late and the night is a ruin, my voice says
the night is a ruin, my voice doesn’t say a thing,
my poem says my voice doesn’t say a thing, . . . 

--From "Tulip Tree," a poem by Dan Chiasson.  Knopf included it in their Poem-a-Day mailing for National Poetry Month on April 12, 2019.  "Tulip Tree" was published in Natural History, a collection of poetry by Dan Chiasson (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

Most mornings I got out of bed and went to the refrigerator to see how my mother was feeling.  You could tell instantly just by opening the door.  One day in 1960 I found a whole suckling pig staring at me.  I jumped back and slammed the door, hard.  

--From Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, a memoir by Ruth Reichl (Broadway Books/Random House, 1998). 

My mother's name was Miriam, but most people called her Mim. . . .  I've got Mim Tales by the dozen, and I've used them for years to entertain my friends.  As a writer I've always known how lucky I was to have so much material, and my first book opened with Mom accidentally poisoning a couple of dozen people at a party.  After the book was published people kept asking, "Did she really do those things?"

--From For You Mom, Finally (previously published in hardcover as Not Becoming My Mother), a memoir by Ruth Reichl (Penguin, 2010).

A Note on the Author [Me, age 9, lying in bed reading The Big Book of Horrible Rare Diseases] 

--From Theories of Everything, an enormous collection of cartoons by Roz Chast from 1978 to 2006 (Bloomsbury, 2006).  

A quick side note: 

I don't typically mention book tours because they have a relatively short life span, but Roz Chast is currently on tour with Patricia Marx for their book Why Don't You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It? A Mother's Suggestions (Celadon Books, 2019).  Attend an event if you have the opportunity; they are good friends and very entertaining.  (I'd also recommend seeing Ruth Reichl if you can; she is on tour to promote Save Me the Plums.)     

Our friend came over the other night.  He and his terrible girlfriend had finally broken up.  This was his third breakup with that particular girlfriend, but he insisted it was going to be the one to stick.  He paced around our kitchen, working his way through the ten thousand petty humiliations and torments of their six-month relationship, while we cooed and fretted and bent our faces into sympathetic shapes in his direction.  When he went to the bathroom to collect himself, we collapsed against each other, rolling our eyes and pretending to strangle ourselves and shoot ourselves in the head.  
--From You Know You Want This: "Cat Person" and Other Stories, a collection of short stories by Kristen Roupenian (Scout Press, 2019).  This selection is from "Bad Boy," which first appeared in Body Parts Magazine.