Short stories by Joy Williams, micro-memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly, and novels by Vivek Shanbhag, Michael Cunningham, and Ben Lerner

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The driver and I got a late start. I usually decide on these excursions the night before, but it was late in the morning when I informed the friend who was coming to visit me for the weekend that I had to cancel . . . 
—From The Pelican Child, a collection of stories by Joy Williams (Knopf, 2025). This is the beginning of the first story, "Flour." 

Ideas like independent thinking and liberal values are all fine in the abstract, but when your child begins to rebel at home, they turn into hot ghee in the mouth—too good to spit out, too painful to swallow.
—From Sakina's Kiss, a novel by Vivek Shanbhag, translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur (McNally Editions, 2025). Originally published in the Kannada language as Sakinala Muttu in Heggodu, India (Akshara Prakashana, 2021). First published in English in Gurgaon, India (Penguin Random House India, 2023). The line above is from page 57 of the McNally paperback.

When Robbie starts downstairs, from his place to Isabel and Dan's, he finds Isabel on the stairs, sitting with her knees pressed together and her arms wrapped around her knees, as if to make the smallest possible package of herself.
—From Day, a novel by Michael Cunningham (Random House, 2023). This sentence is from page 13 of the hardcover.

I was falling asleep on the train. I was going to interview Thomas, who had just turned ninety. My seat was facing opposite the direction of travel, making it difficult to read his latest book, which I was holding in my hand. It upsets my stomach if I try to read while I'm looking the wrong way—or, as my ten-year-old, Eva, put it on a train to Lublin last summer, if I am "facing the past."
—From Transcription, a novel by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026). I liked the audiobook, too, which was narrated by Seth Numrich.

There wasn't much to do after we'd strolled the porch and ridden a carriage, hence you begged Dad for money so we could hit the tourist drag, but even you didn't think he'd hand over—alongside the usual admonition to look after your little sister—a twenty.
—From The Irish Goodbye, micro-memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly (W. W. Norton & Company, 2026). This line is from "Dad Gave Us Twenty Dollars, Which Was a Lot in 1979." It was originally published in Notre Dame Review, and it appears in The Irish Goodbye on pages 28 and 29 in the hardcover. 

A few poems by Grady Chambers, Dorianne Laux, Mary Oliver, Tina Chang, and Beth Ann Fennelly for Poetry Month

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You could smell the day’s heat even before the day began. 

Constant trickle, endless green trees flanking the highway: 

summer had come back. . . . 

—From "A Known Fact," a poem by Grady Chambers (Quarterly West, Issue 96).

It’s the best part of the day, morning light sliding

down rooftops, treetops, the birds pulling themselves

up out of whatever stupor darkened their wings, . . . 

—From "I Never Wanted to Die," a poem by Dorianne Laux (Poem-a-Day, April 16, 2021, Academy of American Poets).

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees 
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
—From "Wild Geese," a poem by Mary Oliver. 

Up ahead it’s white. Snow animal,

I’m running at your back. I’ve failed to tell you
I’ve been hungry all this time, . . . 

—From "Color," a poem by Tina Chang (Hybrida: Poems, W. W. Norton, 2019).

Today is the day the first bare-chested
          runners appear, coursing down College Hill
                      as I drive to campus to teach, . . . 
—From "First Warm Day in a College Town," a poem by Beth Ann Fennelly (Unmentionables, W. W. Norton, 2008).