Because even if you're speaking about ghosts, you're always speaking about yourself—about your neighbors and about your own history.

You can wake up to someone day after day and still they’ll appear disfigured somehow, pummeled by the early light.  

Compared to Stoker’s belief in the positive influence of the Enlightenment and traditional Christian faith, Eggers’s narrative is a darker meditation on modernity’s spiritual blindness,

If a shared appreciation of culture is a means of expressing these desires covertly, Our Evenings suggests that it can also prove treacherous.

Smoke. Morphine induced reflective flashback. Restricted area. Observe > feel > transcribe > reflect > repeat. Hospital bed. Breaking news. Large blast. Conspiracies. Message boards. Static. Dread. Cybrids. Phantom limb.

I see nothing controversial in the authors’ core argument: that it’s not anti-feminist to wonder whether to have children, and that women who are ambivalent about the question should address it in a timely, direct, and collaborative manner.

Labatut and Best both fear this outcome. But Labatut does not realize we already live in a world governed by an alien intelligence.

There are always reasons one begins to write an endless letter to someone who neither exists, nor ever wanted to. When I started, I was someone, too. Now, to keep going, I sit in the workshop, erasing.

Lange presents a beautiful and moving depiction of Laughner as a tragic poet amidst the end of the industrial empire of which Cleveland and Northeast Ohio were a microcosm.

Resisting conformity in any sense, this flawed, disorienting narration is what chips away at the smooth surface of a perfect system, eroding apathy and repression with a persistent and scattered haunting. An endless proliferation of alternative testimonies, then—this is how defiance is exercised.

like the scholarly work
I’d neglected
before the accident
with its long digressions
on the epistemology
of hero worship.

These were the years of Y2K rapture-tripping, before 9/11 shattered the world—the forecasted apocalypse that never came to pass, as opposed to the actual one we didn’t see coming.

Levrero’s characters often uncover something long neglected, or turn inward in some other way. Consequently, the protagonists in these stories are seemingly at odds with their reality.

They light their soft mustaches with the beating glow of their phones, jingling the hits and misses of a shooting game. They wave them in the air, “Over there,” they yell and disappear. Bugs are erect in the tall grass. I run toward the children, and they toward me, or away, and I run toward them again, barely missing. Their faces gleam green, pink, then red, and purple.

I know that I can never purchase the identity I feel stripped of by histories of immigration and assimilation and gaysian self-hatred. This doesn’t make silk less pleasurable or persimmons less delicious.

I didn’t remember ever actually introducing myself to Lizzie, didn’t remember telling the barmaid about my tenuous tenure in what passed in X for an art world, though I must have, at some point, because there she always was, hovering stern and sudden above, everything she wasn’t asking me aloud blaring through her glare.

The power of poets is often measured in books, but only particular poems from their oeuvre engender the possibility of their eternal greatness.

Can there be a reparative mode of reading the earth, Dreaming seems to ask, that draws us into an epoch of the geopathic? Or a mode of repair that does not draw from the paradigm of work and working?

He manages to embed an impressive amount of personal information in unexpected places, leaving the reader to wonder what is real and what is imaginary. Moreover, and often in the same piece, the writing can move from very funny to strangely poignant.

"Let me duck out of the olden days that I may be free now / somewhat over the choppy waves.