A poem by Shiyang Su; short stories by Alejandro Zambra, Rachel Kushner, and Miranda July; and a novel by Alexandra Chang

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In the previous life, you and I were the last line
of an old Chinese myth: A ransacked empire. 
A black jade swallowed by the young lapidary . . . 
—From "Love Letter," a poem by Shiyang Su, Diode Poetry Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer 2024).

I didn't want to go to New York, because I didn't want to cut my hair. And my father didn't read my "Letter to My Father." 
          "I'll read it next time I feel like crying," he told me. "Except I never feel like crying." 
—From "Skyscrapers," a short story by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, The New Yorker (August 22, 2022), pp. 54-59.

George said that was fine. He had always picked people up. It was like they knew. They understood that they could just walk up to his car window at a stoplight. Crutch up to the window. 
          The man was impressively nimble getting in the car with the crutches and the missing half leg and his beer bottle, as though he'd been managing this way for some time. 
          The gates went up. As they set off, the man raised his bottle in a toast, the turbulence of the uneven train tracks sloshing beer onto the car seat. George did not care, had never cared about anything material and certainly not this Ford Crown Victoria, which looked like an undercover cop car.
—From "A King Alone" by Rachel Kushner, The New Yorker (July 11 & 18, 2022), pp. pp. 50-61.

If I were a more self-assured person I would not have volunteered to give up my seat on an overcrowded flight, would not have been upgraded to first class, would not have been seated beside him. This was my reward for being a pushover. He slept for the first hour, and it was startling to see such a famous face look so vulnerable and empty. 
—From "Roy Spivey," a short story by Miranda July, The New Yorker (June 11 & 18, 2007). It was reprinted in the issue from August 29, 2022, pp. 56-59.

People think I'm smaller than I am. For example, my feet. In fact, I wear size 8.5 or 9. According to Google, these are the most common sizes for American women. Average is good, I reason. It means that wherever I end up in this country it will be easy to find someone whose shoes I can borrow. 
—From Days of Distraction, a novel by Alexandra Chang (Ecco, 2020). 

Novels by Miranda July and Kim Thúy, short stories by Kathy Fish and Alexandra Chang, and essays by David Sedaris

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If you are suffering from insomnia, and you are listening to Miranda July narrate the audiobook version of her recent novel, All Fours, then you, too, may have the experience of being awake at two or three o'clock in the morning listening to her read the following passage about the narrator preparing for a two-and-a-half-week road trip: 

The Benadryl was for sleep, not allergies. I'd been having this thing where I woke up every night at two a.m. It wasn't a big deal unless I didn't have Benadryl and then it was a harrowing fugue state ending only when the sun rose on a fragile, weeping shell of a person, unable to work or think, much less drive safely. That's why I needed extra. 
—From All Fours, a novel by Miranda July (Riverhead Books, 2024). The segment above is from page 25 of the print hardcover. This book is about intimacy and desire, among other things, and has a lot of explicit scenes. 

I have failed the time unit. My father takes down the clock and sets it on the table. He moves the hands. See? I place my pinky against the second hand and wind it counterclockwise.
          Maybe this is a story about a clock with no hands.
—From "Alligator," a piece of flash fiction by Kathy Fish, Northwest Review (2023).

The story of the little girl who was swallowed up by the sea after she'd lost her footing while walking along the edge spread through the foul-smelling belly of the boat like an anaesthetic or laughing gas, transforming the single bulb into a polar star and the biscuits soaked in motor oil into butter cookies.
—From Ru, a short novel by Kim Thúy, translated from the French by Sheila Fischman (Bloomsbury USA, 2012). This book was originally published in French in Canada (Éditions Libre Expression, Montreal, 2009). The English translation was originally published simultaneously in Canada (Random House Canada, Toronto, 2012) and in the United Kingdom (The Clerkenwell Press, a division of Profile Books Limited, London, 2012). A note at the beginning of the book mentions that "in French, ru means a small stream and, figuratively, a flow" (of tears, blood, money). "In Vietnamese, ru means a lullaby, to lull." Based on Kim Thúy's real-life experiences before and after leaving Vietnam, this novel is composed of short, often poetic vignettes.  

Now I was very much in my thirties, jobless, with nothing tying me to the place where I lived besides the one-bedroom apartment I rented that still had ten months on the lease. I wasn't hurting for money yet, but I was bored and growing increasingly anxious. I suspected I should be doing more with my time than eating weed gummies and lying in bed binge-watching reality dating shows with heinous and hilarious names like Simp Island and From Stalker to Lover. The shows made me certain I would die alone. It wasn't necessarily the most frightening thought, since I liked being alone, but it was the first time in my life that I had the time to meditate on my mortality, on how everything I had spent the last seven years of my life doing—focusing on my career, developing my independence, saving my money for some future better life—had been, ultimately, meaningless . . . 
—From Tomb Sweeping, a collection of short stories by Alexandra Chang (Ecco, 2023). This segment is from the first story, "Unknown by Unknown" (pp. 1-23 in the paperback). My favorite stories from the collection were two that appeared back to back and felt somewhat related: "A Visit" (pp. 106-116) and "Flies" (pp. 117-135), the latter of which was first published in Harvard Review (Issue 58).   

Bonus book to read again: 

I was on the front porch, drowning a mouse in a bucket, when this van pulled up, which was strange. On an average day, a total of fifteen cars might pass the house, but no one ever stops, not unless they live here. And this was late, three o'clock in the morning. 
—From Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, a memoir/collection of essays by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Company, 2004). This segment is from "Nuit of the Living Dead," which appears on pages 246-257 of the original hardcover and appeared in The New Yorker (February 16, 2004), pp. 74-78, with the title "The Living Dead."