"Guys at our high school baited gator. Brynn didn’t like it, but she usually tagged along, which meant that I’d go too. They brought cases of cheap beer and built bonfires out of old Christmas trees down at the river, which ran about forty minutes away from our neighborhood. We’d carpool out in all the boys’ shitty cars with no air-conditioning, struggling souped-up engines, windows rolled down until we were nearly coated in condensation."
"Just two years shy of 30, Patsy has nothing to show for it besides the flimsy brown envelope that she uses to shade herself from the white-hot glare of the sun. The envelope contains all her papers—from birth certificate to vaccination records. But most importantly, it carries her dream, a dream every Jamaican of a certain social ranking shares: boarding an airplane to America. For the destination, and for the ability to fly."
"At an abandoned building’s fence, we sat on old ashes and traded banter. we gathered supplies on torn glossy pages between our splayed legs. The pages were brochures from American colleges mailed free of charge upon request. The brochures showed students smiling and holding folders close to their chests or sitting with legs crossed on stone benches, lecture halls with semicircular tiers, beautiful young ladies playing handball on well-manicured turf."
"Preamble (draft) How can I write what happened? (This “how” kept me up at night for many years.) And how can what I write escape the traps of distortion and domination of official history? I realize there’s something paradoxical and ironic about it. Is it reasonable to worry about the fate of what I write before my pen even begins to bleed ink onto paper?"
"Having smoked and drunk again, counted the glasses and my cigarettes, saving two for today, as there are three days left till Monday, without Ivan. Sixty cigarettes later, however, Ivan is back in Vienna, first he’ll call the time service to check his watch, then dial 00 for the wakeup service, which phones right back, immediately thereafter he’ll fell asleep as quickly as he alone can do, then he’ll wake up (with the service) in a grumpy mood he always expresses in different ways using sighs, curses, tantrums, complaints."
"The story goes that in my family there’s an extra dinner guest at every meal. He’s invisible, but always there. He has a plate, glass, knife and fork. Every so often he appears, casts his shadow over the table and erases one of those present. The first to vanish was my grandfather."
"The key to successful technology consists of convincing addicts that the future’s heart beats within it, that its mere existence entails the inexorable dissolution of their enemies. In principle, its users are born different from one another, but soon they begin to resemble one another so much that in the end they cease to exist as individuals. Only by collaborating with the invasion can they survive."
"In an account sent to the Philosophical Transactions but for some reason never published there, or anywhere else, a young G. W. Leibniz, who throughout his life was an assiduous inquirer into miracles and other aberrations of nature, related the odd and troubling encounter he had with a certain astronomer who’d predicted that at noon on the last day of June 1666, the brightest time of day at nearly the brightest time of year, the Moon would pass very briefly, but very precisely, be-tween the Sun and the Earth, casting all of Europe for one instant in absolute darkness, “a darkness without equal in our history, but lasting no longer than four seconds,” the astronomer predicted, according to Leibniz, an eclipse that no other astronomer in Europe was predicting, and which, Leibniz explained, drew his notice in part because the astronomer in question, whose observations of the planets and the fixed stars were supposedly among the most accurate and the most precise ever made, superior to Tycho’s, was blind, and “not merely completely blind,” Leibniz wrote (in my translation from the Latin), “but in fact entirely without eyes.”"
"December 31, 2008. All too often paper hats are involved. Other things about New Year’s Eve that mortify Bunny are false gaiety, mandatory fun and that song, the one that’s like the summer camp song. Not “Kumbaya,” but that other summer camp song, the secular one, where everyone links arms and they sway as they sing, “Friends, friends, friends, we will always be.” It’s not that song either, but the New Year’s Eve song also requires arm linking and swaying and it sentimentalizes friendship with an excessive sweetness that is something like the grotesquerie of baby chicks dyed pink for Easter."
"It was early morning when Georgi woke them. An unreal, magical light came down through the ceiling. Wegener put on his passably dried clothing—the cloth trousers, the ironed vest, dogskin trousers, his thick, stuffed fur boots, the skiing shirt, the blue sleeveless cardigan. After a breakfast of shark in bread soup, Wegener tended to Loewe’s wounds one last time. Small pieces of bone had festered out over night. As they had no more bandages, he plucked the splinters out of the gauze with tweezers and reused the material."
"Stella Fortuna the Second’s earliest memory is of the day she almost died for the first time, the episode with the eggplant. Most of us have memories from when we are three or four years old—often foggy, impressionistic, colors or words instead of whole, solid moments. Stella had none of these. Her first memory was vivid, complete, and late: she was four and a half, and she was waking up in a shadowy brown room redolent with the sweet-rot smell of mint. She was in intense pain."
"Ernesto is now a number. He had a face, hair, beautiful hands. He laughed, sucking up air like a century-old combustion engine. He was a good boy. Better than me. And now he is a number on a list of thirty-thousand desaparecidos who never came home."
"Sophia, sandals off, was standing at the water’s edge. The bay snuck up to swallow her toes. Gray salt water over bright skin. “Don’t go out any farther,” Alyona said.The water receded. Alyona could see, under her sister’s feet, the pebbles breaking the curves of Sophia’s arches, the sweep of grit left by little waves. Sophia bent to roll up her pant legs, and her ponytail flipped over the top of her head. Her calves showed flaking streaks of blood from scratched mosquito bites. Alyona knew from the firm line of her sister’s spine that Sophia was refusing to listen."
Robert said I should try again to offer Pete some money. We argued about it.He brought it up at a dinner party with Greg and Sally. Tell me, he said, is it or is it not weird that Mad Pete is giving free art lessons to Lanny?
"Clem wakes today, three days before her wedding, much as she does every morning: impatient for her life. Impatient to make her entrance in it. Standing on the threshold of what Mantha would call Future Life. The Main Act. She feels the impatience as a physical sensation. In her fingers, mostly, a king of distant throbbing, as if she had a build-up of sap in her veins and it needed to flow."
"He had never described his wife, but Fay knew who Elise was the moment she folded her hands on the bar. Something essential changed about a person, Fay thought, when they belonged fully to someone else, as particular as a color. A certain softness in the shoulders, a diminished curiosity that came from no longer performing for potential futures. She was disgusted by it, she was envious."
This isn’t anyone’s autobiography. What I’ve lost is so easy to name as to make it impossible to speak about.These are the two terse sentences Clare Elwil has been writing for the past ten weeks.
He had a gun. There was a gun in the house. A gun a gun a gun.
The days were rapidly lengthening; I could barely remember the spun-out dawns and twilights of winter. But although the nights were short, they felt long and wild. We had rearranged the beds again, each one against a different wall, and Pei-Pei and I were sleeping with our heads pointed to the same corner.
"The instant that Ma Daode, director of the newly created China Dream Bureau, wakes from his snooze, he discovers that the adolescent self he has just dreamed about has not disappeared but is standing right in front of him. It is an afternoon in late spring, and he has been dozing in his swivel chair, his shoulders hunched over and his pot belly compressed into large rolls of fat."
Lit Hub has always brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for your contribution, you'll get an ad-free site experience, editors' picks, and our Joan Didion tote bag. Most importantly, you'll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving.