Short stories by Lauren Groff, novels by Maria Stepanova and Solvej Balle, a poem by Stephen Ruffus, and a documentary by Jota Mun

~
Aunt Maisie had packed his suitcase the night before and left it near the front door, and so he dressed himself without turning on the light and came out and dropped the pajamas on top of the suitcase. She was in the kitchen, banging the pans around.
—From Brawler, an electric short story collection by Lauren Groff (Riverhead Books, 2026). These sentences are from the beginning of "To Sunland," which appeared in The New Yorker in 2022. This is the third story in Brawler (51-78); it's one of my favorites and also one of several that I had already read prior to picking up this collection. Lauren Groff narrated her own audiobook, which was excellent. The other notable thing about this collection is the physical book itself. Jaya Miceli's jacket design, which features art by Vladimir Dunjić, is stunning. It's worth buying the hardcover of Brawler for the dust jacket and endpapers alone. 

When M was a child, her mother told her that a long time ago the signs on the doors of the metro stations in her native city had the terrifying words There is No Way Out etched into the glass, as if passengers were being advised to abandon all hope. By the time M had grown up enough to travel on the metro herself, the same prohibition was phrased more usually as No Exit or Closed, and although it meant much the same, the sense of frightening hopelessness had disappeared—that's how much the choice of words matters.
—From The Disappearing Act, a slim novel by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale (New Directions, 2026). It is also available in English from Fitzcarraldo Editions. These wonderful lines are from page 83 of the New Directions paperback. 

I have met someone who remembers. . . . His name is Henry Dale, and I don't need to tell him that time has ground to a halt. He already knows. 
—From On the Calculation of Volume III, a novel by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (New Directions, 2025). This is the third book in the series of seven and has been published by arrangement with Copenhagen Literary Agency. Originally published as Om udregning af rumfang III (Pelagraf, 2022). 

I have a brand-new spine
built from an Erector Set,
the surgeon’s favorite tool kit.
—From "Home from the Hospital," a poem by Stephen Ruffus, New World Writing Quarterly (April 19, 2026). 

I was born in Seoul, South Korea, and I grew up in the Netherlands. 
—From Between Goodbyes, a documentary directed by Jota Mun, airing on season 38 of the show POV on PBS. This documentary is about adoption more generally and these relationships more specifically, but it is also about language, culture, communication, and miscommunication. 

Novels by Bruna Dantas Lobato and Katie Kitamura, a story collection by Jana Egle, and poetry by Daniel Halpern and Małgorzata Lebda

~
Besides plain white bedsheets and a pillow, the only thing I bought for the room was a desk lamp: dark blue, with an adjustable neck, a bit of color standing out against all the shades of beige. When my mom called me on Skype from our apartment on the outskirts of Natal, that's what she saw.
—From Blue Light Hours, a novel by Bruna Dantas Lobato (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic, 2024). 

I saw a flicker of surprise cross [the host's] features as a I pointed [at the young man seated at the back of the restaurant]. He looked quickly from my face to my coat to my jewelry. It was my age, above all. That was the thing that confounded him. He gave a tight smile and asked me to please follow him.
—From Audition, a novel by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books, 2025). I listened to this as an audiobook narrated by Traci Kato-Kiriyama, and I would also recommend it in that format. 

Should we take a trip?  
—"Invitation," a poem by Daniel Halpern, The New Yorker (March 11, 2024, pp. 44-45).   

Dita is standing at the window in her home, an opened letter in her hands, waiting for Niks to drive up with their two smallest children. That morning they'd gone to Niks's mother's places to get some potatoes—they didn't have any of their own left.
—From Birthday, a short story collection by Jana Egle, translated from the Latvian by Uldis Balodis (Open Letter, 2025). The book was originally published as Dzimšanas diena (Latvijas Mediji, 2020). This segment is from the story "The Debt," which appears on pages 25-44 of the trade paperback. Please note: this book contains at least two stories that may not be suitable for everyone. 

Night here in the valley spreads out its vigil,
night of one place following after another.
—From "Faithful Animal," a poem by Małgorzata Lebda, translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal. Six of Małgorzata Lebda's poems from her book Mer de Glace were translated into English and included, along with a personal essay, in the eleventh installment of the "Literature and Democracy" series from New England Review.

Novels by Susan Choi and Giovana Madalosso, short stories by Mariana Enriquez and Etgar Keret, and a cross-genre book by Marie NDiaye

~
Louisa and her father are making their way down the breakwater, each careful step on the heaved granite blocks one step farther from shore. Her mother is not even on the shore, for example seated smiling on the sand. Her mother is shut inside the small almost-waterfront house they are renting, most likely in bed. 
—From Flashlight, a novel by Susan Choi (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025). 

I'm kidnapping a child. I try to push this thought away, but it keeps coming back as we go down the elevator, say hi to Chico, pass the gates. We do these things every day, go downstairs, say hi to Chico, pass the gates, step on only the black tiles or the white on the sidewalk. But today it's different even if we're not doing anything different, because I know the white army stares at me. Mrs. Fernanda made up this moni­ker, the white army. And she's not wrong, we really look like an army, especially this early in the morning, when they're all in the piazza in their white nanny uniforms . . . 
—From The Tokyo Suite, a novel by Giovana Madalosso, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato (Europa Editions, 2025). Originally published in Portuguese as Suíte Tóquio (Todavia, 2020). 

[Silvia] was our "grown-up" friend, the one who took care of us when we went out and who let us use her place to smoke weed and meet up with boys. But we wanted her helpless, ruined, destroyed. Because Silvia always knew more: If one of us discovered Frida Kahlo, oh, Silvia had already visited Frida's house with her cousin in Mexico, before he disappeared. 
—From "Our Lady of the Quarry," a story from The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, a collection of short stories by Mariana Enriquez, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Hogarth, 2021), pp. 13-25 in the paperback. I first read "Our Lady of the Quarry" when it was published in English in The New Yorker in December 2020. This book was originally published in Spanish as Los peligros de fumar en la cama by Editorial Anagrama in Barcelona, Spain (2017). 

His Tinder profile said his name was Oshik, he was thirty-eight, married with no kids, looking for a serious relationship. Dorit, who wasn't new to online dating, had never come across such an unusual line, and he sounded so square and had such high cheekbones and enormous blue eyes that she was curious enough to give it a try.
—From "Gondola," a short story by Etgar Keret, which was included in his new collection, Autocorrect, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston (Riverhead Books, 2025). "Gondola" appears on pages 11-22 of the hardcover. My other favorites from this collection were the title story, "Autocorrect" (71-77), "Director's Cut" (107-108), and "Earthquake" (151-159). 

Evening has come, and the Garonne is rising hour after hour in the dark.
          We all know the river can rise nine meters above its banks before it overflows, thanks to the levees surrounding the village.
—From Self-Portrait in Green, a short, cross-genre book by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (Two Lines Press, 2014, 2023). Originally published in French as Autoportrait en vert (Mercure de France, 2005). 

Poetry by Edgar Kunz and Leigh Lucas, and short stories by Mary Grimm, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Bennett Sims

~
He was like tissue paper
coming apart in water.
—From Fixer, a collection of poetry by Edgar Kunz (Ecco, 2023). These lines are from "Fixer" [I held him together], which was first published (as "Piano") in The New Yorker (November 7, 2022), p. 41. It appears on pages 46-47 of the paperback. 

All that week, Bob Lilly was working on the gas tank of his car, which had to be replaced. He was doing it in my driveway because he lived with his sister, and she wouldn't let him do it at her house. He was the smartest person I had ever met, which didn't mean that he was in any way a success in life or had as much sense as my cat. 
—From "Fate and Ruin," a short story by Mary Grimm, One Story, Issue 265 (May 15, 2020).

Buchi woke to the thwack-thwack of the machete in the grass and the offended clucks of the chicken who took issue with the noise. Every few moments a ping would echo as the blade struck the stucco of the house. She counted on the sharp sound to wake her daughters.  
—From What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, a collection of short stories by Lesley Nneka Arimah (Riverhead Books, 2017). This section is from "Buchi's Girls," which begins on page 123 of the hardcover. This particular story originally appeared in Five Points (Vol. 16, No. 3).

The boy begs his mother to buy him a balloon. As they leave the grocery store and cross the parking lot, he holds the balloon by a string in his hand. It is round and red, and it bobs a few feet above him. Suddenly his mother looks down and orders him not to release the balloon. Her voice is stern. She says that if he loses it, she will not buy him another. The boy tightens his grip on the string. He had no intention of releasing the balloon. 
—From "Fables," a short story published in White Dialogues: Stories by Bennett Sims (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), pp. 127-139 in the paperback. "Fables" was previously published in Conjunctions and Subtropics (as "The Balloon"), and anthologized in the Pushcart Prize XXXIX. I mentioned a couple of stories from one of his other books, Other Minds and Other Stories (2023), in a blog post from 2024.

I empty my pockets of odd little flyers and tear-off numbers
for pest solutions and local handymen. I save them; some
may prove critical at the end of the world.
—From "I empty my pockets of odd little flyers," a poem published in Landsickness, a chapbook of poetry by Leigh Lucas (Tupelo Press, 2024, p. 9). This poem was first published in The Tusculum Review. 

Novels by Miranda July and Kim Thúy, short stories by Kathy Fish and Alexandra Chang, and essays by David Sedaris

~
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." 

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

~
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 Etgar Keret, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Maki Kashimada; an essay by David Sedaris; and three poems

~

Summers spent practicing in the apartment

stairwell: hand on the bannister, one foot after

another. Did I ever tell you I couldn't walk

until I was three and then sort of dragged

myself up and downstairs until I was seven

or eight? . . . 

—From "Achingly Beautiful How the Sky Blooms Umber at the End of the Day, Through the Canopy," a poem by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (Poem-a-Day, June 15, 2015, Academy of American Poets). 

SAD COW

A. had a recurring dream. He dreamed it almost every night, but in the morning, when Goodman or one of the instructors woke him and asked if he remembered what he had dreamed, he was always quick to say no. This wasn't because the dream was scary or embarrassing, it was just a stupid dream in which he was standing on top of a grassy hill beside an easel, painting the pastoral landscape in watercolors. The landscape in the dream was breathtaking, and since A. had come to the institution as a baby, the grassy hill was probably an imaginary place he had thought up or a real place he had seen in a picture or short film in one of his classes. The only thing that kept the dream from being completely pleasant was a huge cow with human eyes that was always grazing right next to A.'s easel.

—From "Tabula Rasa," a short story by Etgar Keret. It appeared (pp. 29-44) in his story collection Fly Already, which was translated into English by Sondra Silverston, Nathan Englander, Jessica Cohen, Miriam Shlesinger, and Yardenne Greenspan (Riverhead Books, 2019). The collection was originally published in Hebrew, in somewhat different form, as A Glitch at the Edge of the Galaxy (Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2018). "Tabula Rasa" was first published in English as "A.: Only Through Death Will You Learn Your True Identity" in a Fiction Issue of Wired (December 13, 2016).

The room's a bit dark, the lights are off. The heat feels excessive even though in general I tend to prefer the heat. I start to take off my jacket and scarf right away. There's just one other patient waiting, another woman trapped with me in that room. She looks about twenty years older than I am. She watches me carefully, without warmth in her eyes. Her gaze is impenetrable. I can't manage to remove the scarf, it's gotten tangled up with my necklace. How ridiculous. The woman keeps looking at me as if there were a screen between us, as if I were a person on television.

—From Whereabouts, a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf, 2021). The book was originally written and published in Italian as Dove Mi Trovo (Milan, Italy: Ugo Guanda Editore S.r.l., 2018) and translated into English by the author. This section is from page 20 of the hardcover.

Taichi, however, was unaware of her thoughts. Having boarded the bullet train, his four bad limbs bumped against the seats here and there, until finally he came to the one designated on his ticket and sat down with a plump. If he were anyone else, his failure to show reserve with respect to his disability might, far from engendering sympathy, have invited nothing short of annoyed frowns. But he was oblivious to that kind of unreasonableness. He merely beckoned to her from his seat, as if his having found it by himself were some kind of great achievement. 

—From Touring the Land of the Dead, a novella by Maki Kashimada, translated from the Japanese by Haydn Trowell (Europa Editions, 2021). Also included in the book is a second novella, Ninety-Nine Kisses. The pair were originally published in Japanese as Meido Meguri; 99 no seppun (Tokyo, Japan: Kawade Shobo Shinsha Ltd. Publishers, 2012).

My sister is not dating anyone—a good thing, as she’s got way too much time on her hands. And that, I think, is the No. 1 reason so many relationships fail. Too much free time, and too much time together. I’m normally away from Hugh between four and six months a year, and when the pandemic cancelled the tours I had scheduled I panicked. We were in New York at the time, so I sought out his old friend Carol. “What’s he really like?” I asked her. “I think I sort of knew once, but that was twenty-five years ago.”
—From "Pearls," an essay by David Sedaris, The New Yorker (May 17, 2021), pp. 20-22. 

Slowly the great birds rise into the soft golden air above the village.

—From "The Great Birds," a poem by Kenneth Patchen, Poetry (May 1955).

It is 1992. Weekends, we paw at cheap
silverware at yard sales.
—From "Naturalization," a poem by Jenny Xie (Poem-a-Day, August 28, 2017, Academy of American Poets).

Fiction by Sigrid Nunez, Valérie Perrin, Danielle McLaughlin, and Ben Lerner, and a poem by Lisa Allen Ortiz

 ~ 

I went to hear a man give a talk.  The event was held on a college campus.  The man was a professor, but he taught at a different school, in another part of the country.  He was a well-known author, who, earlier that year, had won an international prize.  But although the event was free and open to the public, the auditorium was only half full.  I myself would not have been in the audience, I would not even have been in that town, had it not been for a coincidence.  A friend of mine was being treated in a local hospital that specializes in treating her particular type of cancer.  I had come to visit this friend, this very dear old friend whom I had not seen in several years, and whom, given the gravity of her illness, I might not see again.  

        It was the third week of September, 2017.  I had booked a room through Airbnb.  The host was a retired librarian, a widow. . . .

        A cat had been promised, but I saw no sign of one.  Only later, when it was time for me to leave, would I learn that, between my booking and my stay, the host's cat had died.  She delivered this news brusquely, immediately changing the subject so that I couldn't ask her about it--which I was in fact going to do only because something in her manner made me think that she wanted to be asked about it.  And it occurred to me that maybe it wasn't emotion that had made her change the subject like that but rather worry that I might later complain.  Depressing host talked too much about dead cat.  The sort of comment you saw on the site all the time.  

--From What Are You Going Through, a novel by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead Books, 2020).  Nunez's previous book, The Friend, was a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction.  

We arrived at the Brancion-en-Chalon cemetery on August 15th, 1997.  France was on holiday.  All the locals had taken off.  The birds that fly from grave to grave weren't flying anymore.  The cats that stretch out between the potted plants had disappeared.  It was even too warm for the ants and lizards; all the marble was burning hot.  The gravediggers had the day off, as did the newly deceased.  I wandered alone around the paths, reading the names of people I would never know.  And yet I immediately felt good there.  Where I belonged.  
--From Fresh Water for Flowers, a novel by Valérie Perrin, translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle (Europa Editions, 2020).  Originally published in French as Changer l'eau des fleurs (Editions Albin Michel: Paris, France, 2018).  This segment is from page 17 in the hardcover version.   

From the ditch behind the house, Kate could see her husband up at the old forestry hut, where mottled scrubland gave way to dense lines of trees.  "Colman!" she called, but he didn’t hear.  She watched him swing the axe in a clean arc and thought that from this distance he could be any age.  Lately, she’d found herself wondering what he'd been like as a very young man, a man of twenty. She hadn't known him then.  He had already turned forty when they met.

        It was early April, the fields and ditches coming green again after winter.  Grass verges crept outward, thickening the arteries of narrow lanes.  "There's nothing wrong," she shouted when she was still some yards off.  He was in his shirtsleeves, his coat discarded on the grass beside him.  "Emer rang from London.  She's coming home."
        He put down the axe.  "Home for a visit, or home for good?"  He had dismantled the front of the hut and one of the side walls.  On the floor inside, if floor was the word, she saw empty beer cans, blankets, a ball of blackened tinfoil.

--From "The Dinosaurs on Other Planets," a short story by Danielle McLaughlin, The New Yorker (September 15, 2014), pp. 80-87.  

The year before, they'd found cavities in the author's wisdom teeth; they needed to come out.  He could elect I.V. sedation ("twilight sedation") or just local anesthetic, as the dentist suggested.  They'd taken a panoramic X-ray of his head, chin on a little stand while a camera whirred and clicked around him, and then scheduled the extractions for the following month, when the dentist was back from vacation.  There was no rush.  It would be a few days of unpleasantness, that's all.  Let the office know twenty-four hours in advance if you want the I.V., said the receptionist, whose fingernails were painted with stars.
        He learned from the Internet that the difference between twilight sedation and local anesthesia was not primarily a difference in the amount of pain but in the memory of it.  The benzodiazepines calm you during the procedure, yes, but their main function is to erase your memory of whatever transpires: the dentist getting leverage, cracking, a sudden jet of blood.  This helped explain why the people he asked were fuzzy regarding the details of their own extractions, often unsure if they'd been sedated or not.
        That October his ruminations about twilight sedation dominated his walks with Liza.  They would meet at Grand Army Plaza in the late afternoon and head into the Long Meadow of Prospect Park, then wander along the smaller trails as the light died in the trees.  Finally, it was the last walk before he had to call if he wanted the I.V.

--From "The Golden Vanity," a short story by Ben Lerner, The New Yorker (June 18, 2012), pp. 66-73.

Do bees breathe?

I don't want to look it up.  

I just want to believe 

that you are a bee

and I am the poppy you rest in. 

--From "Exaltation," a poem by Lisa Allen Ortiz, Broadsided Press (August 1, 2019).  

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

~

"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.

A poem by Stephen Dunn and short fiction by Rebecca Lee and Etgar Keret

~
You shouldn't be surprised that the place 
you always sought, and now have been given, 
carries with it a certain disappointment. . . . 
--From "The Inheritance," a poem by Stephen Dunn, The New Yorker (September 4, 2017), p. 28.

It was the terrine that got to me.  I felt queasy enough that I had to sit in the living room and narrate to my husband what was the brutal list of tasks that would result in a terrine: devein, declaw, decimate the sea and other animals, eventually emulsifying them into a paste which could then be riven with whole vegetables.
--From "Bobcat," a short story by Rebecca Lee, in Bobcat & Other Stories (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2013), pp. 1-30.  "Bobcat" was originally published as a chapbook with Madras Press, 2010.

This old house, belonging to my friends Lesley and Andy, had been built in 1904 in a neighborhood that pretended it was on solid ground--old, Victorian homes with pillars and porticoes--but if you stepped through the screen door into the garden out back, you could feel the sand under your feet, and despite Lesley's beautiful mazes of trees, you could tell the ocean had been here not long ago, and would be again.
--From "Settlers," a short story by Rebecca Lee, in Bobcat & Other Stories (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2013), pp. 195-209. 

Dad wouldn't buy me a Bart Simpson doll.  Mum actually said yes, but Dad said I was spoiled.  "Why should we, eh?" he said to Mum.  "Why should we buy him one?  All it takes is one little squeak from him and you jump to attention."  Dad said I had no respect for money, that if I didn't learn it when I was young when would I?  Kids who get Bart Simpson dolls too easily grow up to be louts who steal from kiosks, because they're used to getting whatever they want the easy way.  So instead of a Bart Simpson doll he bought me an ugly china pig with a flat hole in its back, and now I'll grow up to be OK, now I won't be a lout.
--From "Breaking the Pig," a short story by Etgar Keret, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu, in The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories (Riverhead Books, 2015), pp. 27-30.  "Breaking the Pig" was first published in Hebrew in Missing Kissinger (Zmora Bitan, 1994). 

Three poems by Lynne Knight, a novel by Samanta Schweblin, and a short story collection by Ha Jin

~
We broke things.  Glasses, a lead crystal vase, 
the ceramic chicken painted à la portuguaise.  

It was the longest, hardest winter in a decade.
Snow against the windows, sealing us inside.
--From "Survival," a poem by Lynne Knight, published in Poetry Daily on November 10, 2016, from her collection The Persistence of Longing (Terrapin Books, 2016).  


I loved hearing the guy on the local station
in the small town where I lived for twenty years: 
Here in the foothills of the Adirondacks.
I was trying to become a poet, and I thought
everything I heard could become a poem
if I could figure out how to make use of it, 
the way frontierswomen made use of berries . . . 
--From "The Twenty-Year Workshop," a poem by Lynne Knight, Rattle, Number 50 (Winter 2015).  


I was thinking No.  No, oh no.  Not one more thing.
I was thinking my mother, who sat rigid
in the passenger seat crying, How terrible!
as if we had hit a child not your front bumper, 
would drive me mad, and then there would be 
two of us mad, mother and daughter . . . 
--From "To the Young Man Who Cried Out 'What Were You Thinking?' When I Backed Into His Car," a poem by Lynne Knight, Rattle, Number 32 (Winter 2009).  


It's dark and I can't see.  The sheets are rough, they bunch up under my body.  I can't move, but I'm talking.
          It's the worms.  You have to be patient and wait.  And while we wait, we have to find the exact moment when the worms come into being.
--From Fever Dream, a brief novel by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Riverhead Books, 2017).


The moment Hong Chen entered the narrow lane leading to Lilian's house, a bloody rooster landed before her, jumping about and scattering its feathers.  Four little boys ran over with knives and a hatchet in their hands.  "Kill, kill him!" one boy cried, but none of them dared approach the rooster, whose throat was cut half through.
--From "Taking a Husband," a short story by Ha Jin, from his often brutal collection Under the Red Flag (Zoland Books/Steerforth Press, 1999), pp. 132-153.