Every month, our desks at the Review pile up with dozens of soon-to-be published books, only some of which involve writers we have heard of, or subjects we know anything about. More often, we wind up with a mix somewhere between that of a cabinet of curiosities and a Little Free Library stocked by an indecisive grad student; in the past few weeks, for example, in addition to Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History and Tom Overton’s John Berger: From Life, we found a copy of the agent Ari Emanuel’s memoir, the comedian Ms. Pat’s memoir, a history of the doctor thought to be the real-life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, and a collection of personal essays on gynecological health. While combing through these galleys for good ideas or good writing, we sometimes save passages we like. Here are a few from September and October.

—Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Emma Eaton, editorial intern

Here are the opening words of a new release by the author Helle Helle, translated from the Danish by Martin Aiken. The book is titled Hafni Says (New Directions):

that she’s getting divorced. 

Patricia Lockwood’s new collection, Agate Head / Stone Soup (Penguin Books), is all geology, cutting, and interiors. She’s taken up lapidary and given up her phone, and in the introduction, she writes that she has started to notice things again. One poem, “Forged in Fire,” is about a metalworking-game-show contestant whom Lockwood developed a big crush on: 

He lived in a trailer in the crystal
Wilderness, on the edge of a lake
And underneath wheeling eagles.
There was no ceiling on him.
He looked like a chainsaw carving
Of something falling through high air.

Adolfo Bioy Casares’s Morel’s Invention (NYRB), newly translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, is a tight, Surrealist mystery novella set on an island. It was the source for the film Last Year at Marienbad (1961). From the foreword by Borges:

Having discussed the details of his plot with the author, and having reread the book, I believe it would be neither inaccurate nor hyperbolic to describe it as perfect.

Monica Nelson’s These Long Shadows: Women’s House Museums in the American South (Atelier Éditions) is a visual history of fourteen houses and their fourteen female inhabitants—a list that includes the authors Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Mitchell; the reporter Ida B. Wells; the founder of the Girl Scouts, Juliette Gordon Low; and the singer Nina Simone. One of the visuals, from chapter 10, “The Pervasive Margaret Mitchell”:

Mary Rose Taylor, the first steward of the Margaret Mitchell house, stands in front of the charred building after it had been set ablaze (twice) by unknown arsonists who opposed its preservation before it was set to open to the public for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. The house has long stood as a lightning rod for racial injustice in Atlanta and a pillar of the Lost Cause mythology, largely popularized by Mitchell’s book Gone with the Wind. Photograph by Dwight Ross, Jr. Copyright © the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Courtesy of the Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, via Monica Nelson.

A passage from Kate Zambreno’s novel in parts, Foam (Semiotexte):

Clarice Lispector’s “The Fifth Story” is a story of repetitions of apartment life. There are many different possible titles, we are told at the beginning. “How to Kill Cockroaches” is one. You use sugar, flour, and gypsum. But the cockroaches keep repeating through the story, as does the narrator complaining about cockroaches. The cockroaches belonged to the ground floor and scurried up the pipe. You have to poison cockroaches in cycles, a friend wrote me, right when I began taking notes for this project, years ago. At least three cycles of them. Once they die there are still more waiting to hatch. 

For a less grim encounter with the natural world, you might try Aya Kōda’s essay collection Tree: My Encounters with Trees (HarperOne), first published posthumously in 1992, and now appearing in English for the first time, translated from the Japanese by Charlotte Goff. This book, which makes a cameo in Wim Wenders’s film Perfect Days, is a kind of arboreal travelogue of Kōda’s visits to some of Japan’s most notable trees, written as though she is ringing up an old friend:

Last year I had the chance to meet the legendary Jomon Sugi, and what a year it was for me … It is true, of course, that there’s no risk of trees being out when you call, so in that sense it is easy enough if you just decide to pay a visit.

Later, after explaining that the Jomon Sugi tree lives on an island called Yakushima, known for having “20,000 deer, 20,000 monkeys, and 20,000 people,” she writes: 

Some of the cedars on Yakushima are given the name Yakusugi, from the first characters of the island combined with sugi, the variety of cedar tree. This name is reserved for sugi trees over a thousand years old, whilst those under a thousand are known as ‘little cedars’. Quite a high bar when you think about it.

A line from The Contessa (NYRB), Benedetta Craveri’s biography of Virginia Verasis di Castiglione, the Italian socialite and spy once tasked with seducing Napoleon III on behalf of Italian unification, whose numerous affairs and talent for self-mythologizing made her the “forerunner of the tabloid celebrity.” Her habit of sitting for hundreds of photographs and distributing them throughout nineteenth-century Parisian media made her a known quantity, instantly recognizable for her theatrical accessories:  

Even in the early 1870s, the great memoirist of the Second Empire, Arsène Houssaye, crossing the Place Vendôme late one night, felt his heart skip a beat when he saw “a passerby taking shape in the nocturnal dark … preceded by two little dogs [like] two balls of fat  … covered, more than dressed, in a light cloak with a frilled hood … ‘Behold, take heed, there is Castiglione.’ ”

An early exchange between the protagonist of Agnes Owens’s A Working Mother (McNally Editions) and her husband: 

‘I’ve got a job,’ I told Adam.

‘Good for you. I can now relinquish all responsibility for this household then?’

‘And I can save up for a divorce.’

‘So, let’s celebrate,’ said Adam.