story: “Commerce and Residue”
author: Tim Fitts
year: 2017 (in Go Home and Cry for Yourselves)
where: mio ufficio
note: a great story for our age of cultural appropriation politics
a line: “Marcus slightly envied the fact that Pham had an automatic angle borne into her. She was part of the diaspora. Her father had spent time in re-education camps.”
story: “Cream”
author: Haruki Murakami
year: 2019
where: in the bedroom
note: There wasn’t a cat.
a line: “In my life, whenever an inexplicable, illogical, disturbing event takes place (I’m not saying that it happens often, but it has a few times), I always come back to that circle—the circle with many centers but no circumference.”
story: “Meals for Mourners/兄弟”
author: K Ming Chang
year: 2019
where: around the house
note: from the Nashville Review
a line: “She wears her scarves even in the shower: checkered wool ones, polka-dotted cotton ones, infinity scarves in colors that scratch at your eyes, yellow and green and pink. Mama always says the best way to hide something is to draw attention to it.”
story: “Nashua”
author: Sara Majka
year: 2016
where: on the golden sofa
note: the kind of story that makes you want to write stories
a line: “I cried some nights as I wanted a child back then and I was almost past the point of being able to have one.”
story: “The Billings Brothers at the End of the World”
author: Chelsea Hanna Cohen
year: 2019
where: back home, Abu Dhabi
note: from Split Lip
a line: “Philip thinks there’s something wrong with the ride, but then he realizes that everything is shaking and Suzie is screaming and off in the distance the skyline of the city crumbles, entire skyscrapers falling into themselves before his eyes, and he barely has time to marvel at what he’s seeing before the bones of the Ferris wheel give way as well.”
story: “Saint Andrew’s Hotel”
author: Sara Majka
year: 2016
where: Greece
note: from Cities I’ve Never Lived In
a line: “Peter stayed in the hospital until he was twenty-one; nobody could find his parents, and the hospital had put him to use in the kitchen.”
story: “The Adventure of a Soldier”
author: Italo Calvino
year: 1984 (English translation)
where: Philadelphia train
note: Such great description of how time stretches in the moments of nearness to someone we desire.
a line: “This meeting of calves was precious, but it came at a price, a loss: in fact, the body’s weight was shifted and the reciprocal support of the hips no longer occurred with the same docile abandon.”
