We’re always trying to compress experience into words, our lives into stories, and it’s impossible to get it exactly right. But almost everything that’s beautiful in life comes from giving it an honest shot.
The House Inside the House of Gregor Schneider – Gary J. Shipley
That something lets itself be replicated, ad infinitum . . . brings forth the idea that the truth may be singular but its expressions are many.
Rereading Silence: From the Diaries of Those Years – Yevsey Tseytlin
Rereading Silence is a diary and a confession, a portrait of an incredibly cruel epoch and of the narrator’s soul.
All-Night Pharmacy – Ruth Madievsky
Despite the sedating effects of the opioids the narrator consumes, Madievsky’s prose is clear and insightful, rivaling William S. Burroughs’s dizzying classic, Naked Lunch.
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya is the greatest Russian writer fans of nineteenth-century literature have never heard of.
There is something about the wreckage that won’t settle on a beginning, or a single subject, the way a collision might also make one part of the rubble indistinct from another.
It could be the booming voice of an angel, it could be a jinn, or somebody standing behind a hill, shouting at you, and as a poet I don’t discriminate too much. I just need the raw material.
Something in My Throat – Meghan Racklin
Whisper networks whisper for a reason: It is hard to speak into the face of power, of silence and its stories.
When the emotional experience is turned into a musical one, it conveys emotion to other people, but for the artist it brings—what else but joy in the well-made thing?
Return to Latvia – Marina Jarre
What it might have cost Jarre emotionally to face this awful truth, one can only imagine. But we readers are the grateful, if tearful, recipients of this revelatory largesse.