Woman of the Ashes
Mia Couto, Trans. by David Brookshaw
“Mother says: Life is made like string. We need to braid it until we can no longer distinguish its threads from our fingers.”
Home Archive by category Excerpts (Page 88)
Excerpts
“Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs”
Gerald Murnane
“I first read part of the novel À la recherche du temps perdu, translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, in January 1961, when I was aged a few weeks less than twenty-two years. What I read at that time was a single paperback volume with the title Swann’s Way.”
Blue Self-Portrait
Noémi Lefebvre, Trans. by Sophie Lewis
“The pianist’s entrance is always a big moment, I had expected this moment to be a big one and I wasn’t disappointed.”
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky
Jana Casale
“Karole kaner had been one of Leda’s favorite professors. She was an aloof woman who wore indefinable writerly clothing (Is that a vest or a robe or just a dress maybe?).”
The Chandelier
Clarice Lispector, Trans. by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards
“Before falling asleep, concentrated and magical, she would say farewell to things in a last instant of lightly illuminated consciousness. She knew that in the half-light 'her things' were better living their own essence.”
“The Epidemic”
Dino Buzzati, Trans. by Judith Landry
“The whole great office had been organized for the war, and functioned at a slacker pace nowadays; but the staff of the department was still complete. The men who worked there were the best in the country at the particular work concerned. They were known jokingly within the Ministry as the 'twenty-four geniuses.' ”
“As an illustration of what I was up against at Napa State Hospital, what they used to call an asylum for the criminally insane, my fellow inmate Arn Boothby, an angry three-hundred-pound paranoid schizophrenic who regularly “cheeked” his meds, tried to kill another inmate one day in the client convenience store by grabbing his throat and throwing him through a glass display case.”
“Captain Renzi”
Alessandro Spina, Trans. by André Naffis-Sahely
“Captain Renzi's gaze was lifeless: instead of establishing a dialogue with his interlocutor, he'd been tasked to ensure it wouldn't happen. Even his way of talking put people off: he meticulously avoided any kind of intimacy, which made any dialogue with him as abstract as a carpet's geometric patterns.”
Census
Jesse Ball
“My brother Abram Ball died in 1998. He was twenty-four years old and had Down syndrome.”
Let’s No One Get Hurt
Jon Pineda
“If I concentrate, I can see where the river should be. It almost doesn’t exist, like the blue of skim milk.”
Feast Days
Ian MacKenzie
“Elizabeth Bishop, a person I admire, once lived in Brazil. She wrote a book about the country for the Life World Library. She fought with the publisher over points of style, and complained theatrically about it in letters to Robert Lowell.”
The Gunners
Rebecca Kauffman
“Mikey Callahan discovered something about himself when he was six years old. Students from his first-grade class were taken one at a time from the classroom and ushered to the gymnasium for standard medical tests.”
“The Dot Sisters”
Christine Schutt
“In the windy city they sway on a bridge and let the wind get under their dresses, Claire and Julia, happy. Let them be happy. They have suffered.”
Stray City
Chelsey Johnson
“My mother loved limits. They were a ten-foot fence guarding her and her family. Nothing could get in, nothing could get out.”
The Fighter
Michael Farris Smith
“When he was two years old the boy was dropped off at the donation door at the Salvation Army secondhand store in Tunica wearing nothing but a sagging diaper.”
“Passing Through”
Tatyana Tolstaya, Trans. by Anya Migdal
“Things, as we know, disappear—often under strange circumstances—and they don’t come back.”
“The Nightingale That Speaks”
Najla Jraissaty Khoury, Trans. by Inea Bushnaq
“Long ago, in a former age and a bygone time, there was a king who wished to test the loyalty of his people. He issued a command that for one night no light must show in any part of the city.”
The Life to Come
Michelle de Kretser
“The house by the river belonged to an old man whose relationship to George Meshaw was complicated but easily covered by 'cousin.' He had lived there alone, with a painting that was probably a Bonnard.”
Lacking Character
Curtis White
“What follows is a story of contagion, and it begins, as all such stories must, with a message both obscure and appalling.”
“Birds of Paradise”
Rania Mamoun, Trans. by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
“The little girl’s laughter jars on my ears. I turn to look at her. She dashes through the airport lounge, brandishing her doll with a buoyancy unsuited to the time of day.”
Page 88 of 99
