Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.
—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor
From Ann Rower’s Lee & Elaine (Semiotext(e)), first published by Serpent’s Tail in 2002:
For months after she’d put her signature bubblegum vaginas on his mailbox.
From Daniel Poppick’s The Copywriter (Scribner):
“I’m done,” Ruth says over a quarter of a plate of roasted cauliflower, delivering the words like a lithe boxer elegantly working a punching bag. One of our cats, the bullseye tabby, jumps on the table and in a single motion I mindlessly pick him up and throw him on the couch, where he emits a soft meep upon impact. Lucy reaches for Ruth’s plate. “Oh, I meant I’m done with poetry,” says Ruth. “But you can take the plate. Thank you, it was delicious.”
From Birgitta Trotzig’s Queen (Archipelago), translated by Saskia Vogel and first published in Swedish in 1964:
She’d seen nothing of the parts through which she’d traveled. Neither could she see any of this landscape, whether there were forests or plains: behind the lit-up station building was nothing but impenetrable darkness, in the darkness a distant rumble could be heard, it was the mumble and roar of the Baltic but this she did not know, she’d never gone to school and knew little of how the world was constituted. She had a flat young face that looked like a child’s, she could have been taken for a fourteen-year-old, a not particularly developed fourteen-year-old—in contrast to what was child-like, her unripe, mild humdrum unmoving flat little face, the sudden heft of her womanly hips made it seem as if her body from the hips down were self-contained, there a heavy being had borne and endured a life that had passed her face by; her belly was rounded as if she were a mother several times over (though she’d never carried a child to term). She wore a long cumbersome black coat that looked like a refashioned man’s overcoat—it wasn’t the sort of garment one should wear, it was a garment that inevitably drew all eyes to her. She looked unusual. She didn’t look like people did. Her hair was black and parted down the middle, headscarf knotted good and tight below her chin: she looked like what she was, a farm girl or woman from deepest Europe. But she was coming from New York: something had happened to her there. And now she could remember but little—items, stains, fragments. As if something had burst. And she could feel no more. Only fear—but not the fear of something, just fear as something (a lump, a stone, a dead fetus) gleamed dimly beneath a stiffened, already crackling, discolored fine-grained surface. She was an empty box: playing across its plundered deep interior was an eternally flickering reflection, tall flame-shadows. Her interior had been emptied and now was full of fireshadows, shadows solely.
From Emily Nemens’s Clutch (Tin House/Zando):
Those nine months weren’t an actual pause, neither calm nor cool nor collected—there was a war going on in Afghanistan and another one in Iraq, the mind-bend of Adaptation and all those airlines running out of money. But for the women, in general, the year was blissfully boring. Snow flurries and warm cookies, gossip and karaoke at the local dive bar, the leaves falling off the trees and then the trees growing leaves again. Carson read Victorian literature (back then she was both fascinated and repelled by the marriage plot; now she was mostly bored by it), and Gregg was in the campus production of Guys and Dolls (made contemporary by its gender-blind casting; Sergeant Sarah Brown was a brawny six foot three). The world was quiet, but it was different from the stretched-out, flickering hush of Hillary’s bereavement time, unlike the expanse of silent days during that first fall together, in the immediate aftermath of the towers. Then, everyone moved around campus like they each were carrying a dozen eggs, and not in anything as sophisticated as an egg carton—eggs in the crooks of elbows, set into that dip behind the clavicle. Eggs delicately balanced on the tops of heads, in belly buttons, against eye sockets, cradled in the hollow at the back of the knee. Students, contorted with care and wincing pain, moved slowly and spoke quietly and arced wide around one another.
From Richard Hell’s Godlike (New York Review Books), first published by Akashic Books in 2005:
It was March and the weather was like a pornographic high-fashion magazine.
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