The Door
“Have you ever killed an animal?” I said I had never killed anything. “You will. You’ll put Viola down. You’ll have him injected, when the time comes. Try to understand. When the sands run out for someone, don’t stop them going. You can’t give them anything to replace life. Do you think I didn’t love […]
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry
A few days go by. Maybe a few weeks. But after that, one by one, other different children start tagging along with Alex and Elsa in the playground and corridors. Until there are so many of them that no one dares to chase them anymore. Until they’re an army in themselves. Because if a sufficient […]
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
…the true master does not seek to run away from Death. He accepts that he must die, and understands that there are far, far worse things in the living world than dying. —J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerers‘ Stone
…to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. —J.K Rowling
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
I have no idea what I hope to accomplish. I only know that I must try to see her. That’s what love is about, Roger. It’s when a woman drives all lucid thought from your head; when you are unable to contrive romantic stratagems, and the usual manipulations fail you; when all your carefully laid […]
Euphoria
I have done it. Full fathom five it lies. Hiding out here in the 3rd class library for the time being. Strange how a ship was our doing and now our undoing. Let him rage. Let him rage across the oceans. But he will rage alone. I am getting off tomorrow at Aden. Doubling back […]
Lovecraft Country
…stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn’t make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though. —Matt Ruff
What is the What
The government burned the villages to punish them for supporting the rebels. It’s very easy to kill a town, yes? Harder to kill an army. —Dave Eggers
Uncanny Valley
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The Tsar of Love and Techno
His gaze climbed her legs. When he reached her eyes, she’d already seen him. “I’m Kolya,” he managed to say. “Galina,” she replied. Her lips flattened and curved at the ends like something wet that hadn’t dried right. It was a smile. His chest unzipped from the inside. —Anthony Marra
The Turner House
Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do. Men and women assign value to brick and mortar, link their identities to mortgages paid on time. On frigid winter nights, young mothers walk their fussy babies from room to room, learning where the rooms catch drafts and where the floorboards creak. In the warm damp of summer, […]
H is for Hawk
A sudden thump of feathered shoulders and the box shook as if someone had punched it, hard, from within. ‘She’s got her hood off,’ he said, and frowned. That light, leather hood was to keep the hawk from fearful sights. Like us. Another hinge untied. Concentration. Infinite caution. Daylight irrigating the box. Scratching talons, another […]
The Sellout
Hospitals don’t have the rainbow of directional lines anymore. In the days of butterfly bandages, sutures that didn’t dissolve, and nurses without accents, the admitting nurse would hand you a manila folder and you’d follow the Red Line to Radiology, the Orange to Oncology, the Purple to Pediatrics. But at Killer King, sometimes an emergency […]
Delicious Foods
People who have everything and everything works, those folks don’t even notice that they have it. But set an obstacle in a man’s way and he can see his whole life differently. —James Hannaham
Between the World and Me
Michael Brown did not die as so many of his defenders supposed. And still the questions behind the questions are never asked. Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be? —Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Nightengale
“Men tell stories,” I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. “Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it […]
Avenue of Mysteries
Most dump kids are believers; maybe you have to believe in something when you see so many discarded things. And Juan Diego knew what every dump kid (and every orphan) knows: every last thing thrown away, every person or thing that isn’t wanted, may have been wanted once—or, in different circumstances, might have been wanted. […]
Fredrik Backman—A Man Called Ove
Fates and Furies
It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. […]
Thirteen Ways of Looking
Curious thing, the snow. They say the Eskimos have eighty words for it. An articulate lot. Slush and sleet and firn and grain. Hoar and rime. Crust crystal vapor blizzard graupel. Pendular permeable planar. Striated shear supercooled. Brittle glazed clustered coarse broken. An insult of snow, a slur of snow, a taunt of snow, a […]
