Poetry by Louise Glück, memoirs by Abigail Thomas and Busy Philipps, stories by Amparo Dávila, and a novel by Anne Tyler

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It's not easy to pluck individual poems from her books, since Glück was particularly adept at conceiving of book-length sequences—each of her collections is best encountered as a whole, like a Pink Floyd album that doesn't readily yield a hit single.
—From "Five Louise Glück Poems to Get You Started," an article by Gregory Cowles, The New York Times (October 13, 2023). Louise Glück died earlier in October at the age of eighty. My favorite of the poems Cowles singled out was "Matins," which begins with these lines: 

I see it is with you as with the birches:
I am not to speak to you
in the personal way. 

The full poem, "Matins" (meaning "Mornings" in French), is available online from the archive of the Los Angeles Times (September 20, 1992). It, along with others of the same title, is included in her collection The Wild Iris (Ecco, 1993). 

We met in 1979. I was thirty-seven; he was twenty-seven. I had been twice divorced and had four children, Chuck was happily married and had none. I was working at a publishing company as a slush reader, which meant I handled everything that came without an agent. He took over my job because I had been promoted to editorial assistant. . . . It was my job to train him, but all I wanted to do was make him laugh. He was good-looking and nervous, an interesting combination. 
—From What Comes Next and How to Like It, a memoir by Abigail Thomas (Scribner, 2015). This segment is from "When It Started" (pp. 6-7). There is also an excellent unabridged audiobook version, which is narrated by the author (Simon & Schuster Audio Editions, 2015). 

"Just as the police van pulls up we could see you coming around the corner in your diaper. And there was a woman on a bike behind you." 
—From This Will Only Hurt a Little, a memoir by Busy Philipps (hardcover, Touchstone, 2018; paperback, Gallery Books, 2019). Sometimes a good audiobook is a nice accompaniment to the print book, but in this case, if you have the option, just jump straight to the audiobook. It is narrated by Busy Philipps and is entertaining and sometimes poignant (Simon & Schuster Audio, 2018). My favorite story is in the chapter called "Your Ex Lover Is Dead - Stars." It would probably also be funny on the page, but her delivery is everything here. A sample of the audiobook is available on the website for Simon & Schuster.

He awoke in a hospital, in a small room where everything was white and spotlessly clean, among oxygen tanks and bags of intravenous fluid, unable to move or speak, no visitors allowed.
—From The Houseguest, a collection of ominous little stories by Amparo Dávila, translated from the Spanish by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson (New Directions, 2018). This excerpt is from the final story of Dávila's collection, "The Funeral."  

Bonus book to read again: 

My brother Jeremy is a thirty-eight-year-old bachelor who never did leave home. Long ago we gave up expecting very much of him, but still he is the last man in our family and you would think that in time of tragedy he might pull himself together and take over a few of the responsibilities. Well, he didn't. 
—From Celestial Navigation, a novel by Anne Tyler (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974).

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 by Elena Ferrante, Kiara Brinkman, Rumena Bužarovska, and Hiromi Kawakami, and poetry by Louise Glück and José Antonio Rodríguez

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Day and night come
hand in hand like a boy and a girl
pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish
painted with pictures of birds.
—From Winter Recipes from the Collective, poems by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). This section is from "Poem," pp. 3-4. My favorite poem in this collection is "The Denial of Death," pp. 5-11.

Don't misunderstand me, I love a good poem
Like half my Facebook friends, one that transports you
To a corner of the soul you didn't know was there
Because you couldn’t find the precise metaphor,
Even if you felt it, like that time my parents saw
A local news story of an older woman asking for help
With an ailing husband, and I volunteered to drive them . . .
—From "Shelter," a poem by José Antonio Rodríguez, The New Yorker (April 6, 2020), pp. 48-49.

Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath, in the apartment that my parents, newly married, had bought at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri, in Rione Alto. Everything—the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a frigid February, those words—remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story . . .
—From The Lying Life of Adults, a novel by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2020).

Ronan's mother made him and his brother practice acting bad so it would look real when the nanny from the TV show came. The boys practiced punching at each other and biting, fighting over broken plastic toys that neither of them played with anymore. Their mother said that this was her chance to be discovered. National fucking TV.
        Ronan, she said, let me see you do a temper tantrum.
        I'm tired, he told her—because he was ten, too old for tantrums. It wouldn't be realistic.
—From "If You Can Hear Me Thinking," a short story by Kiara Brinkman, One Story, Volume 6, Number 1 (April 20, 2007).

Nenad lay down on his bed and turned his face to the wall, whimpering quietly now. He didn't react when I touched him. I sat on the side of the bed and gave him a lecture on stealing. I told him that if he stole things, he'd wind up in jail. But since he didn't react to either my caresses or my words I left him there and went to the living room. Gene was sitting staring at a blank TV screen.
        "Maybe you shouldn't have beaten him so hard," I said. "He's really upset."
—From My Husband, stories by Rumena Bužarovska, translated from the Macedonian by Paul Filev (Dalkey Archive Press, 2019). This segment is from "Genes," pp. 33-54.

A white cloth was lying at the foot of a zelkova tree. When I walked over and picked it up, I saw a child underneath. 
—From People from My Neighborhood, stories by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen (Soft Skull Press, 2021).

Flash fiction by Ron Nyren and Francine Witte, and several poems about stories

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The summer of no breeze, six men carried an enormous fan up the stairs of my grandmother's four-story townhouse and installed it in the roof.
--From "Vertical Travel," a story by Ron Nyren, 100 Word Story (April 24, 2019).

Six months gone, but it's still my sister's birthday, and so we buy a cake.
--From "Candle," a story by Francine Witte, Fourth & Sycamore (August 15, 2018).

Halfway through the sentence
she fell asleep.  She had been telling 
some sort of fable concerning
a young girl who wakens one morning
as a bird.
--From "An Endless Story," a poem by Louise Glück, The Threepenny Review (Summer 2018).

You chase me through a cornfield
and we arrive in a clearing.  All
that we know and do not know
shimmers between us, an invisible
door with no way to open or close.
--From "Bringing in the Sheaves," a poem by Donna Vorreyer, from her poetry collection Every Love Story Is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016), p. 15.  A different version of this poem was first published in the Apple Valley Review (Fall 2012) and later reprinted in the 2014 edition of New Poetry from the Midwest (New American Press).

dark, the better for sleeping, brown like my eyes, 
you said, (may we all find that one person who will
compare our eyes to Ralph Lauren paint colors
instead of noticing the chipped polish on our left
foot) but my eyes aren't brown at all, . . .  
--From "We are painting the bedroom," a poem by Donna Vorreyer, from her poetry collection Every Love Story Is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016), p. 64.

He's a happy baby.  How old is he?
I ask the woman who is reading a magazine 
and seems to have forgotten 
the baby at my feet.  She looks up and I watch 
her mind chew through my question.  
Seven months maybe.  Or eight, she says
then adds, He isn't my baby.
--From "Baby Facing the Wrong Way in the County Jail," a poem by Nancy Miller Gomez, from her chapbook of poetry and short essays, Punishment (Rattle, 2018), p. 22.