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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."