Novels by Domenico Starnone and Claire Adam, stories by Kaori Fujino, and comics by Nathan W. Pyle

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I was on my way to the beach, having slept poorly the night before due to the strong wind. . . . I felt confused, out of sorts, maybe I was unwell again, and in that moment of disoriented stillness, the only thing that moved was a small figure outlined in gold: it wasn't a body, a whirlwind of dust, or a flash of light, but a presence, and it ran past me down the steps and burrowed into the sand a little further on. 
—From The Old Man by the Sea, a novel by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky (Europa Editions, 2025). Originally published as Il vecchio al mare by Giulio Einaudi Editore, Torino, Italy (2024). 

We'd be traveling by night, and anything that might catch in torchlight had to be covered, including my own skin. The Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard was one difficulty, the Guardia Nacional on the Venezuelan side was another, but the worst problem was bandits. Bandits would steal the engine off the back of the boat and leave you out there to drift, or they would take the whole boat, and throw you in the sea. I also had a pillowcase to go over my head: the reflection of torchlight against things like eyeballs and teeth had been known to give people away. 
—From Love Forms, a novel by Claire Adam (Hogarth, 2025). (I didn't realize initially that "Forms" is being used here as a verb. The title is from the end of a poem called "The Fortress" by Louise Glück.) After the opening section, I found this to be a slow, rhythmic book, very introspective. I also listened to the audiobook, narrated by Melanie La Barrie. One of my favorite sections of this book, both in print and audio, was the part about Auntie Pam (in Chapter 8, pp. 104-109 in the hardcover). 

"I can't marry you." That's what my father told you on the first day of his affair with you. You were so surprised all you could say was, "Oh." My father went on, with what seemed to be genuine regret, that he had a wife and child. 
—From Nails and Eyes, a short collection by Kaori Fujino, translated from the Japanese by Kendall Heitzman (Pushkin Press, 2023). The Japanese version was originally published in Tokyo by Shinchosa Publishing Co., Ltd., in 2013. The book includes the title story, excerpted above, which is about ninety pages long, and two additional short stories. 

-You must position those [cards] so that you can observe them but I cannot
- OK
- You do not want me to know what you know
- I will be discreet with my knowledge
—From Strange Planet, a collection of comics by Nathan W. Pyle (Morrow Gift, an imprint of William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2019). There is also a follow-up, Stranger Planet (2020). 

Short stories by Marianne Villanueva, and novels by Amy Tan, Avdotya Panaeva, Sayaka Murata, and Domenico Starnone

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She's leaning forward, as if to kiss him. There's a mark on his cheek; perhaps she's done it already. They are both smiling. 
          These were my parents in Manila, circa 1956. They were happy; they had always been happy. The happiness of their marriage was like a reproach. 
—From Mayor of the Roses, a collection of short stories by Marianne Villanueva (Miami University Press, 2005). This segment is the opening of "Picture" (pp. 87-92).

[Art's daughters] wore their long chestnut hair alike, pulled into ponytails high on their heads so that they cascaded like fountain spray. All their friends wore their hair in an identical style, Ruth had noticed. When she was their age, she had wanted to grow her hair long the way the other girls did, but her mother made her cut it short. "Long hair look like suicide maiden," LuLing had said. And Ruth knew she was referring to the nursemaid who had killed herself when her mother was a girl. Ruth had had nightmares about that, the ghost with long hair, dripping blood, crying for revenge.  
—From The Bonesetter's Daughter, a novel by Amy Tan (Ballantine, 2001). This is from page 21 of the trade paperback.

In a room lit by a dim candle, they washed the dead body of my six-month-old sister. . . . The room was silent; neither my father nor my mother cried. Only the wet nurse cried—about the gilded cap and fur coat that she had lost due to my sister’s premature death. If the baby had waited five or six months longer to die, the nurse's work would have been through, and the promised reward would not have slipped through her fingers.
—From The Talnikov Family, a novel by Avdotya Panaeva, translated from the Russian by Fiona Bell (Columbia University Press, 2024). 

In the sex education class the next day, though, I was taught something completely different [from what my mother had explained to me]. We were made to watch endless videos about the mechanism of artificial insemination and the mystery of bringing a new life into the world.
—From Vanishing World, a novel by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove Press, 2025).

Between the ages of eight and nine, I set out to find the pit of the dead. At school, in Italian class, I had recently learned about the legend of Orpheus and how he travelled to the underworld to bring back his girlfriend, Eurydice, who, unhappily, had wound up there after getting bitten by a snake. My plan was to do the same for a girl who was not my girlfriend but who might be if I managed to lead her back above ground from below . . . 
—From The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan, a novel by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky (Europa Editions, 2024). 

Poetry by Louise Glück, an essay by Akhil Sharma, and fiction by Choi Eunyoung and Domenico Starnone

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My story begins very simply: I could speak and I was happy.
Or: I could speak, thus I was happy.
Or: I was happy, thus speaking.
I was like a bright light passing through a dark room. 
—From Faithful and Virtuous Night, an award-winning collection of poems by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). This section is from the title poem, pp. 8-17. My other favorite poems in this collection are "A Sharply Worded Silence," pp. 19-21; "The Melancholy Assistant," pp. 45-46; and "A Foreshortened Journey," pp. 47-48.

She kept checking her reflection in building windows. This was our first invitation to someone's home since we'd arrived [in Germany] three months before, so I guessed Mom was feeling nervous in a good way.
         "Xin chào." Mom said the memorized Vietnamese greeting when Mrs. Nguyển opened the front door. I chimed in, "Xin chào," and Mrs. Nguyển smiled in delighted surprise. She greeted us like we were old friends she hadn't seen in years. Mr. Hồ was in the kitchen. His ruddy cheeks and boyishly mischievous face instantly won me over. Mr. Hồ was Dad's coworker, and when he discovered I'd become classmates with his son, Thuỷ, he invited our whole family to his house.
        The dinner Mr. Hồ made was simple, cozy fare. I'm not sure if you can call food "cozy," but there's no other word for it. Beef stew with tomatoes cooked over a slow fire, fragrant steamed rice, grilled prawns, sauteed vegetables, savory fried dumplings with half a lime squeezed over them. 
—From Shoko's Smile, a collection of short stories by Choi Eunyoung, translated from the Korean by Sung Ryu (Penguin Books, 2021). This section is from "Xin Chào, Xin Chào," pp. 59-85. My other favorite story in this collection is the last one, "The Secret," pp. 232-256. 

Christine grew up very poor in Dublin. As a child, she experienced periodic bouts of homelessness. When her family was able to get public housing, it was in a neighborhood where heroin was endemic. The family eventually settled in an area where children were regularly attacked by a local pit bull and people would come running with flaming torches, because fire was one of the few things that would make the dog unclench its jaws. I grew up with a severely brain-damaged brother, whom my parents took care of at home. My brother could not walk or talk or roll over in his sleep. Some nights, we didn't have health aides and my parents stayed up to turn him from side to side so he wouldn't get bedsores. My wife and I are careful people. We feel lucky to have the lives we have, and we don't want to mess them up. Our imaginary child was not careful at all.
        Normally, it is the parents who imagine a future for the child and, through the imagining, hold open a space for the child to step into. In our case, it was the reverse.
—From "A Passage to Parenthood," published in print as "Imagining Ziggy," a personal essay by Akhil Sharma, The New Yorker (January 31, 2022), pp. 24-28.

On that occasion, maybe I interrupted her one too many times, since I liked the girl from Arles and wanted her to like me. Then Teresa turned to me, furious, seizing the bread knife and shouting: try to cut off what I'm saying one more time and I'll cut out your tongue and then some. We faced off in public as if we were alone, and today I believe we really were, such was the extent that we were absorbed with each other, for good and for ill. Our acquaintances were there, sure, and the girl from Arles, but they were inessential figures, all that mattered was our ongoing attraction and repulsion. It was as if our boundless admiration for each other only served to ascertain that we loathed each other, and vice versa.
—From Trust, a novel by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions, 2021). This segment appears on page 15. 

Fiction and poetry by Domenico Starnone, Sayaka Murata, Mary White, and more

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One evening Betta called, crankier than usual, wanting to know if I felt up to minding her son while she and her husband took part in a mathematics conference in Cagliari.  I'd been living in Milan for a couple of decades, and the thought of decamping to Naples, to the old house I'd inherited from my parents, and where my daughter had been living since prior to getting married, didn't thrill me.  I was over seventy and, having been a widower for some time, had lost the habit of living with others.  I only felt comfortable in my own bed and in my own bathroom.  Furthermore, I'd undergone, a few weeks earlier, a small surgical procedure which, even in the clinic, seemed to have done more harm than good.  Though the doctors poked their faces day and night into my room, to tell me that everything had gone fine, my hemoglobin was low, my ferritin was poor, and one afternoon, I saw small heads, plaster-white, stretching toward me from the opposite wall.
--From Trick, a novel by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions, 2018). Originally published in Italian as Scherzetto (Einaudi: Torino, Italy, 2016).

The morning period is passing normally in the brightly lit box of the convenience store, I feel.  Visible outside the windows, polished free of fingerprints, are the figures of people rushing by.  It is the start of another day, the time when the world wakes up and the cogs of society begin to move.  I am one of those cogs, going round and round.  I have become a functioning part of the world, rotating in the time of day called morning.
--From Convenience Store Woman, a novel by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove Press, 2018).  Originally published in Japanese as Konbini ningen (Tokyo, Japan: Bungeishunjū Ltd., 2016). 

When my fiancé left for the war 
Which is still going on 
I prepared increasingly elaborate foods
--From "Expectation Management," a poem by Mary White, Communion Arts Journal (June 2019).

Like, he's definitely cheating.  He's not even trying to hide it anymore.  He's such a piece of shit.  Take a left here.  And the worst part is she's not going to say anything either.  I mean, she's basically just waiting for him to leave her.  It's honestly stressful just being in the same room as them.
--From Bottled, a graphic novel by Chris Gooch (Top Shelf Productions, 2017). 

I didn't belong there.  I wandered through the succession of rooms, with a glass of overly acidic champagne in my hand.  I looked at the other guests.  Their self-confidence, the way they held their heads.  Their facial expressions.  They formed familiar little clusters, burst out laughing, glanced over at rival groups, occasionally glanced at the canvases, gushed noisily, turned away, murmured a spicy anecdote or scathing commentary into the ear of an acolyte, demolishing the opus they had just praised in the blink of an eye.  
--From Exposed, a novel by Jean-Philippe Blondel, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (New Vessel Press, 2019).  Originally published in French as La mise à nu (Libella: Paris, France, 2018).

Living alone in his dead uncle's cottage, and with the burden lately of wandering thoughts in the night, Seamus Ferris had fallen hard for a Polish girl who worked at a café down in Carrick.  He had himself almost convinced that the situation had the dimensions of a love affair, though in fact he'd exchanged no more than a few dozen words with her, whenever she named the price for his flat white and scone, and he shyly paid it, offering a line or two himself on the busyness of the town or the fineness of the weather.
--From "The Coast of Leitrim," a short story by Kevin Barry, The New Yorker (October 15, 2018), pp. 70-75.

Fiction and poetry by Ottessa Moshfegh, Jennifer Kronovet, Domenico Starnone, and more

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My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns' lounge.  I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings.  
--From Homesick for Another World, a collection of short stories by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin, 2017).  These lines are from the story "Bettering Myself," which first appeared in The Paris Review. 
 
My husband had warned me about the cameras before we moved to Guangzhou, saying that there would or wouldn’t be video cameras hidden all over our apartment and that someone in the Chinese government would or wouldn’t be watching us at all times.  He told me that there was no point in having a password on my computer because the cameras would see what was on my computer screen.  That’s how good the cameras that did or did not exist were.
--From "The Cameras," a short story by Jennifer Kronovet, Bennington Review, Issue 6.

Today they are talking on the radio about 

how to remember your infant, . . . 

--From "Lost Body," a poem by Jordan Rice, The New York Times Magazine (February 10, 2017).  "Lost Body" is from Constellarium, Jordan Rice's debut collection of poems (Orison Books, 2016).

In case it's slipped your mind, Dear Sir, let me remind you: I am your wife.  I know that this once pleased you and that now, suddenly, it chafes.  I know you pretend that I don't exist, and that I never existed, because you don't want to look bad in front of the highbrow people you frequent.  I know that leading an orderly life, having to come home in time for dinner, sleeping with me instead of with whomever you want, makes you feel like an idiot.

--From Ties, a novel by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions, 2016).  Originally published in Italian as Lacci (Laces) (Einaudi: Torino, Italy, 2014).

That was the summer it rained and rained.  I remember the sad doggish smell of my sweater and my shoes sloshing crazily.  And in every city, the same scene.  A boy stepping into the street and opening an umbrella for a girl keeping dry in the doorway.  
--From Dept. of Speculation, a novel by Jenny Offill (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

Hélène could not remember having ever experienced a perfect moment.  When she was little, she often surprised her parents with her behavior--constantly tidying her room, changing her clothes the moment there was the slightest spot on them, braiding her hair over and over until she obtained an impeccable symmetry; she shuddered with horror when they took her to see Swan Lake because she alone noticed that there was a lack of rigor in the alignment of the dancers, that their tutus did not all drop down together, and that every time there was a ballerina--never the same one--who disrupted the harmony of the movement.

--From The Most Beautiful Book in the World, a collection of short stories by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Europa Editions, 2009).  Originally published in French as Odette Toulemonde et autres histoires (Odette Toulemonde and other stories) (Éditions Albin Michel: Paris, France, 2006).  These lines are from the story "A Fine Rainy Day."