Florence in Ecstasy
Jessie Chaffee
“This morning is every morning.”
Home Archive by category Excerpts (Page 97)
Excerpts
“A New Mohawk”
Chavisa Woods
“Most of the Mohawks in America are unincorporated territories, areas that lie outside of any municipality or township.”
“A Night Out”
Joshua Ferris
“Tom and Sophie waited twenty minutes in a ripe sauna for a transfer at West fourth."
Ernesto
Umberto Saba (trans. Estelle Gilson)
““What’s with you? Tired?” “Pissed.” “About what?” “The boss! Dirty bloodsucker—a florin and a half to load and unload two carts.”
Autumn
Ali Smith
“It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again. That’s the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it’s in their nature. So an old old man washes up on a shore.”
The New Year’s Tree
Mikhail Zoshchenko, translated by Ross Ufberg
“This year I turned forty, friends. Turns out, I’ve seen forty New Year’s Trees. That’s a lot! I guess the first three years of life I didn’t really know what a New Year’s Tree was. I guess Mama took me by the hand. And I guess, with my little black eyes I looked with disinterest at the decorated tree.”
Don’t Tell Me You’re Afraid
Giuseppe Catozzella translated by Anne Milano Appel
“Knowing where to find the human traffickers was easy. All the Somalis in Addis Ababa knew it, and in recent weeks I had asked the right questions.”
The Queue
Basma Abdel Aziz translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
“In the fierce heat, Yehya stood in a long queue that extended from the end of the wide street all the way to the Gate.”
Ear to the Ground
Paul Kolsby & David L. Ulin
“If you looked at a map, you'd think North America began at the Atlantic shore and ran west to the Pacific—through that wide, misunderstood state of Ohio, across forgettable Indiana and the confounding yellow-green flatness of Kansas and eastern Colorado.”
Letters to Vera
Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd, and Olga Voronina
“My delightful, my love, my life, I don’t understand anything: how can you not be with me? I’m so infinitely used to you that I now feel myself lost and empty: without you, my soul.”
Soldier Girls
Helen Thorpe
“Michelle Fischer had not yet reached twenty but she already knew how to find the National Guard Armory, a low-slung, modern-looking building made of red bricks with a green metal roof. It commanded a prominent seat beside the Lloyd Expressway, the main east–west thoroughfare that split the heart of Evansville, Indiana.”
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