The woman suffered. Her soul ached from this slow-paced life that used to be so familiar and dear to her. The woman felt guilty for not having seen the war, not having heard its sounds, not having sensed its smells. She blamed herself for living as if nothing had happened, as if that February had not divided the life of the whole country into a before and an after.
If nostalgia is primarily aesthetic, then it is also unstable, and if we get attached to beautiful images today, we might spurn them tomorrow. We might love the beautiful images because we can’t apprehend them, “the beautiful” always relocating itself, unrecognizable as the city outside, which is why we keep trying to rebuild the city in our minds.
two boys are throwing stones
into the river—their mother
is beating colored dresses
against a small rock—there is...
I have a hostage code, a panic button, motion detectors, sensors
The dryer has run all day, I can’t find my checkbook
The new light bulbs (so I am told) will last forever
“If only.” Said only if a mixed-media retrospect
is also being salvaged, the herringbone chevron
a swimmer inscribes on the mirroring lake.
Not the worst of all chauvinist prigs, I’ll concede, he seemed affronted by the wrongs my little handful of words and lines had done him, their very innocence, their youthfulness, rebuking him. The Pretty Child Can’t Write, She Shouldn’t, She Mustn’t, She Dare Not, She Will Not, The Skinny Co-ed Won’t Write, he seemed to pledge to himself as he drew forth my packet of fledgling verse and...
When I think about the famous crazy writers, I suspect that they didn’t start off crazy. They were very sane to stand as much of it as they did for as long as they did. It is where all the best work comes from.
As she attempts to trace the increasingly portentous-seeming name in her grandfather’s WWI journal chronicling his time digging trenches in France, the narrator of Forgotten Night is haunted by the absence of Jewish life in the villages she travels through, by the desolation of the scattered traces remaining.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen once said, “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” One half of Pam Jones’s newest novel The Arizona Room (Spaceboy Books, 2023) takes place during the World War II; in the second half, its protagonist reconciles with her experience in old age. While we never find ourselves...
I can’t write in an authentic voice if I get in my own way, if my own feelings are there, lurking. I have to disappear, not only for the reader, but for myself, and this art of deliberate, practiced self-annihilation gives me the purest, most exhilarating pleasure I’ve ever known.
Research suggests that reading literature improves theory of mind because it provides a complex look into the lives of people whose circumstances, experiences, and histories are different from our own. Does an improved theory of mind result in selfless behavior? No. If it did, we wouldn’t have literary writers, professors, and readers who are assholes, but we do.
Rodolfo had until then been listening rather distractedly to his elder companion’s lengthy narrative, since the steppe was filled with the scent-portraits of a great many hares, among which there arose suddenly the image of a great bustard, inscribed vividly in three scents, in concrete and relief, like a mezzotint; and there was not a square meter of ground that was not decorated with the tender...
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