Fiction by Ayşegül Savaş and Melissa Broder, a memoir by Jill Ciment, and poetry by Edgar Kunz and Diane Seuss

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On the phone, my grandmother asked me if I had planted anything in our window boxes. She always phoned too early, when I was barely out of bed, forgetting about the time difference. She would begin each call with something she had thought of during the night. 
—From The Anthropologists, a novel by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury, 2024). This segment is from page 10 of the hardcover. 

What do I call him? My husband? Arnold? I would if the story were about how we met and married, shared meals for forty-five years, raised a puppy, endured illnesses. But if the story is about an older man preying on a teenager, shouldn’t I call him “the artist” or, better still, “the art teacher,” with all that the word teacher implies?
—From Consent, a memoir by Jill Ciment (Pantheon Books, 2024). This is essentially a sequel to Half a Life, the memoir Ciment wrote in her mid-forties. It's interesting to see how she looks at the events of her past through different lenses. (When she met her future husband, in the 1970s, he was a Casanova and she felt cool for kissing her art teacher. Today, what happened is more clearly an abuse of power. But it didn't happen now; it happened in the '70s.) What to make of the events, then, especially in light of the way their relationship ultimately played out? After dissecting and amending the earlier memoir, she picks up where it left off.   

I held him together
as long as I could, she says.
—From "Piano," a poem by Edgar Kunz, The New Yorker (November 7, 2022), p. 41.

even i am less a woman than a ball of mercury breaking
into forty pieces of silver.
—From "i lie back on my red coverlet and contemplate," a poem by Diane Seuss, Blackbird, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring 2007), and reprinted with artwork by Tanja Softić in Blackbird's special section called Women Poets from the Archive, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Summer 2024). This specially curated collection of poems from the Founders Archive also includes poetry by Ada Limón, Claudia Emerson, and others.

It didn't matter where I lived—Mid-City, Mid-Wilshire, or Miracle Mile. It didn't matter where I worked; one Hollywood bullshit factory was equal to any other. All that mattered was what I ate, when I ate, and how I ate it.
—From Milk Fed, a novel by Melissa Broder (Scribner, 2021). I read her books out of order, starting with Death Valley (Scribner, 2023), then going back to The Pisces (Hogarth Press, 2018) and Milk Fed. All of these novels are available as audiobooks read by the author, and they are compulsively readable (and . . . listenable?). Broder does include intimate details about her characters' experiences in the bathroom and the bedroom (and everywhere else), so if that's not your cup of tea, you may want to skip these. But there's something very direct and honest about the way she talks about things. Also, it might be helpful to read a little Sappho before starting The Pisces. 

Fiction by Ayşegül Savaş and Camille Bordas, and poetry by Chloe Honum

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I'd been at the apartment for two months when Agnes wrote that she was coming. 
          I heard her from the bedroom late one evening. The door in the hallway opened and closed. She didn't call out to me before going up to the studio. 
          The following day as I was leaving for the library, I ran into her on the building stairs. She was tall and pleasingly thin. Her dark hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was dressed in a crisp white shirt, opening up into an elegant ruffle on one side of her waist, at once striking and casual. Her shoes resembled royal slippers and were the same soft shade of green as her trousers. She may have been on her way to the opera or to a bookshop and would have been comfortable in either place. She wore no ornaments, except for a rectangular gray stone ring on one finger, which I noticed when she extended her hand. 
          "You must be our tenant," she said. "Finally, we meet." 
          She enunciated each word, as if she were reading aloud from a book. 
—From White on White, a novel by Ayşegül Savaş (Riverhead Books, 2021). This section is from page 14 of the hardcover.

This is not a rewrite of that story in which plants and animals and people keep winding up dead over the course of a school year, but it starts the same, and it feels odd not to acknowledge, so I will. I just did. Things kept dying. My father first, in June, then the puppy my ex-wife had adopted to help the children get over their grandpa, and then the school janitor, Lane. Right after Halloween, Lane had died during lunchtime in the cafeteria, in front of the kids. Heart attack. A few weeks later, my son, Ernest, came home from school and told me that he hoped there was no afterlife.
          "I hope there’s no afterlife," he said. We were in the living room, looking through the window, waiting to see if the rain would turn to snow. "I hope he's not watching over me."
          I asked who he meant. I thought maybe he was talking about my father, but perhaps it was Lane on his mind. I didn't think it could be the dog.
—From "One Sun Only," a short story by Camille Bordas, The New Yorker (March 7, 2022), pp. 58-64.

Nightly, the smoke from the neighbor's incinerator pawed the air
          in our garden. Black flecks of newspaper settled
across the violets. . . .
—From "Nightfall in Spring," a poem by Chloe Honum, from her collection The Lantern Room (Tupelo Press, 2022), p. 9. My other favorite from this collection of poems was the one that inspired me to buy the book in the first place: "At a Days Inn in Barstow, California" (Poem-a-Day, May 15, 2019, Academy of American Poets). It appeared on page 46 of The Lantern Room. Many of the poems from this book previously appeared in her chapbook Then Winter (Bull City Press, 2017). Honum is also the author of The Tulip-Flame (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014). That book's cover, which I find really astonishing, features a photograph of this piece of artwork: Bust (Impression), life size: 17" x 21.5" x 13", 2005, cast glass, by Karen LaMonte. 

Fiction by Ayşegül Savaş and several poems

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She didn't think they'd be staying home very much—there were so many places she wanted to take Leo—but she had in mind a scene of the two of them eating in bed. Did people really do that? It seemed as though there would be too much mess, nowhere to put your plate. Still, she liked the idea: the sleepy indulgence, the sheets streaked with light—the hour, in her imagination, was late afternoon, which may have been the reason for the beer, though this particular timing would require some planning, with everything else she wanted to do with him.
—From "Long Distance," a short story by Ayşegül Savaş, The New Yorker (January 31, 2022), pp. 50-55.

It's dusk on a Tuesday in June. A hot wind
       bears down and east. In my room, a stranger's
hairclip lies like a gilded insect beside the sink.
—From "At a Days Inn in Barstow, California," a poem by Chloe Honum (Poem-a-Day, May 15, 2019, Academy of American Poets). 

When the big clock at the train station stopped,
the leaves kept falling,
the trains kept running,
my mother's hair kept growing longer and blacker,
and my father's body kept filling up with time.
—From "Big Clock," a poem by Li-Young Lee (Poem-a-Day, December 8, 2021, Academy of American Poets). 

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store   
and the gas station and the green market and   
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,   
as she runs along two or three steps behind me . . .   
—From "Hurry," a poem by Marie Howe, from her collection Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W. W. Norton, 2008). Her poem "My Dead Friends" was just published two days ago (Poem-a-Day, February 22, 2022, Academy of American Poets).

Behind the brick house next to us: 
an indoor pool, enormous, used only 
by invisible swimmers.
All winter the windows steam and clear. 
—From "Neighbors," a poem by Laura Cherry, from her collection Haunts (Cooper Dillon Books, 2010), p. 35. It previously appeared in her chapbook, What We Planted, which was the winner of the 2002 Philbrick Poetry Award by the Providence Athenaeum. My other favorite from Haunts was "The Grownups Take Charge," the third part of a four-part poem, p. 70. 

Books by Tove Jansson, Ernest Hemingway, Ayşegül Savaş, Dai Sijie, and Yiyun Li

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"When are you going to die?" the child asked.
        And Grandmother answered, "Soon.  But that is not the least concern of yours."
        "Why?" her grandchild asked.
        She didn't answer.  She walked out on the rock and on toward the ravine.
        "We're not allowed out there!" Sophia screamed.
        "I know," the old woman answered disdainfully.  "Your father won't let either one of us go out to the ravine, but we're going anyway, because your father is asleep and he won't know."
        They walked across the granite.  The moss was slippery.  The sun had come up a good way now, and everything was steaming.  The whole island was covered with a bright haze.  It was very pretty.
        "Will they dig a hole?" asked the child amiably.
        "Yes," she said.  "A big hole."  And she added, insidiously, "Big enough for all of us."
--From The Summer Book, a novel by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal (New York Review Books, 2008).  First published in Swedish as Sommarboken (Schildts Förlags AB: Finland, 1972).

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
        Now that the bad weather had come, we could leave Paris for a while for a place where this rain would be snow coming down through the pines and covering the road and the high hillsides and at an altitude where we would hear it creak as we walked home at night.  Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.  That was where we could go.  Traveling third class on the train was not expensive.  The pension cost very little more than we spent in Paris.
--From A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his life as a young writer in Paris between 1921 and 1926.  He finished the book in 1960 in Cuba.  I was reading the Vintage Classics version (Random House: London, 2000).  It was first published posthumously in Great Britain (Jonathan Cape: London, 1964).  As I understand the story, his fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, edited his manuscripts and notes after his death to create that particular version of the book.  There is also a "restored edition," which contains additional stories left out of the original published book (Scribner, 2009).

I met M. some months after I moved to Paris from Istanbul.  I arrived in the city without a job or a place to live.  I was enrolled in a literature program in order to obtain a visa, but I knew even before I came that I would not attend any of the classes.
        I had enrolled in the same program once before, a few years after I graduated from university in England.  I had a different vision of myself then, and I worked steadily to achieve it.  I was living in London with my boyfriend, Luke, and putting together my life piece by piece.  I imagined that Luke and I would move to Paris, become its natives, and lead the kind of creative life attributed to the residents of the city.  We even spoke to each other in French while we cooked dinner, in preparation for our new life.  
--From Walking on the Ceiling, a novel by Ayşegül Savaş (Riverhead Books, 2019). 

In 1971 there was little to distinguish us two--one the son of a pulmonary specialist, the other the son of a notorious class enemy who had enjoyed the privilege of touching Mao's teeth--from the hundred-odd "young intellectuals" who were banished to the mountain known as as the Phoenix of the Sky.  The name was a poetic way of suggesting its terrifying altitude . . .
        The Phoenix of the Sky comprised some twenty villages scattered along the single serpentine footpath or hidden in the depths of gloomy valleys.  Usually each village took in five or six young people from the city.  But our village, perched on the summit and the poorest of them all, could only afford two: Luo and me.
--From Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, a novel by Dai Sijie, translated from the French by Ina Rilke (Anchor Books/Random House, 2001).  Originally published in France as Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise (Gallimard: Paris, 2000).

Love is made not to last, I said.  A contestable statement, though he chose not to argue.  Love was the word we had used at his leave-taking, he knowing it was final, I sensing it was the case.  But between sensing and knowing there were seven hours and four states.  Only today did I register that people often in their condolence letters called the loss unfathomable.  The distance at the moment of loss could be calculated: 189,200 fathoms.  (What does it matter that fathom is no longer used to measure from here to there?  To obsolete is to let age, from which death is exempted.)
        Not clear, though, is how to fathom time: from a moment to . . .  Can forever be the other end point?
        But why does it bother you if you insist time does not apply to us anymore? Nikolai said.
--From Where Reasons End, a novel by Yiyun Li (Random House, 2019).  The book is a series of imagined conversations between a mother and her sixteen-year-old son in a suspended, timeless state following his death by suicide.  Li wrote the book after the death of her own teenage son.  It's an unusual, affecting meditation on life, death, and the limitations of language.