The Closet
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Roma
Deborah Levy
‘Her husband who is going to betray her is standing inside the city of Roma.’ Dreams of infidelity from Deborah Levy.
A Wooden Taste Is the Word for Dam a Wooden Taste Is the Word for Dam a Wooden Taste Is the Word For
Jesse Ball
‘My friends, what I mean is, this life is shallow like a plate. It goes no further.’
The New Me
Halle Butler
‘But I feel sure. Making some decisions today, no doubt about that! Not thinking about certain things today, no doubt about that!’
Los Angeles
Emma Cline
‘It was only November but holiday decorations were already starting to creep into the store displays.’
Uri
Joshua Cohen
‘There’s just no way, unassisted, to commit suicide. But then there’s no way to be just a human, isolated, stripped or just stripped of contexts – because even a cell must have a floor, a ceiling, walls.’
Trump Sky Alpha
Mark Doten
‘Mr President, we can get you into a bunker with full communication equipment and you can give your address there, you just can’t do it in a goddamn plastic blimp at the start of World War III.’
Revolutions
Jen George
‘Small praise was like a drug for party members, though we used real drugs too, hard ones, drugs that imbued one with the facility for ruthless violence and multiple orgasms.’
Day 4
Rachel B. Glaser
‘She sat sweating on the curb as her mother’s narrow face hovered over the parking lot like a hologram.’
Yport
Lauren Groff
‘She pokes her head through the skylights and sees the tide far out, the exposed seabed sinister as the surface of the moon. Tiny people pick their way across.’
Leaving Gotham City
Yaa Gyasi
‘I can’t remember the last time we said I love you before hanging up the phone. I can’t even remember the last time we said goodbye.’
The Meat Suit
Garth Risk Hallberg
‘All life is suffering. At the zendo where Jolie went Thursdays after sixth period, not much in the way of portable wisdom got dispensed, but this was, near as she could tell, the through line.’
Country & Eastern
Greg Jackson
‘Anyone could find courage when the World-Historical Spirit had selected you to enact your martyrdom on the Six O’Clock News. But in the shadows, in secret, unrecognized?’
Remembering Westgate
Sana Krasikov
‘I wonder if the only way to grasp what is terrifying and unimaginable for those of us who haven’t experienced it is to feel around the contours of inescapability, the boundary of its negative space.’
The Answers
Catherine Lacey
‘And each time I hit the tarmac I had this terrible feeling that the trip I’d just taken had never even happened, that I’d spent hundreds for a memory I could barely recall.’
Bright Circle
Ben Lerner
‘Things he dreamt began to show up in the bushes, the plastic figurine from a parachute firework, the small dull rusted circular saw blade he thought of as a throwing star, and he pocketed those things.’
The Anthology
Karan Mahajan
‘Long before terrorism became fashionable in the West and commonplace in the East, there was a bombing at the Sovereign Center in Delhi.’
Lipari
Anthony Marra
‘Frank Laganà stood on the cliff suited in black, as straight as an exclamation point, poised to leap to his death once again.’
This Is Our Descent
Dinaw Mengestu
‘When it came to our son, her defensive instincts were well-developed and all the more necessary because it was hard from the outside to see why we were so protective.’
Brom
Ottessa Moshfegh
‘I stay mostly in my bedroom chambers, examining what has found its way into my pores or the mucoid crook of my eye.’
All the Caged Things
Chinelo Okparanta
‘All that thought of home gave the girl a sickly feeling, the longing of something so out of reach, something she wasn’t even sure she could any longer truly remember.’
What Terrible Thing It Was
Esmé Weijun Wang
‘Dennis with his bespectacled eyes on his phone, performing the act of emotional multitasking. While I’ve been psychotic, he’s been phone banking.’
I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness
Claire Vaye Watkins
‘The uncooperative cadence of the phrase my myspace page perfectly encapsulates the awkwardness of the early oughts when our story begins.’
Terra Nova
Robert Moor
Robert Moor remembers hitch-hiking across Newfoundland: ‘The way to pronounce Newfoundland, Bill and Sue instructed me, is to remember that it rhymes with understand.’
Last Days on Corfu
Amelia Gray
A novel about the life of celebrated dancer Isadora Duncan. ‘You can feel her in every room. The chandeliers shiver.’
Things I Didn’t Know
Wiam El-Tamami
‘When people would ask me what I was doing in Istanbul, I would explain that I’m a freelance writer and translator, and I move a lot. I move intuitively, I would say: places call to me.’
Mars is a Stupid Planet
Matthew Rohrer
‘Even astronauts describe / our air as thick enough to slice / and spread on toast for breakfast.’
I come from a place on your bucket list
Deepti Kapoor
Deepti Kapoor on travel, authenticity and the peculiarity of being Indian in Uganda.
George Saunders In Conversation | Podcast
George Saunders
A discussion of the mind of Abraham Lincoln, the art of creating historical voices, verbal improv and writing the afterlife.
Elif Batuman | Is Travel Writing Dead?
Elif Batuman
‘The power imbalance built into travel writing is just a heightened version of an imbalance that’s there in all writing.’
Same-same but different | Discoveries
Ka Bradley
This week’s Discoveries features translation in all its many articulations.
