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, assistant editor

From Michael Clune’s PAN (Penguin Press), his first novel:

When there’s nothing solid behind the present moment, when there’s no real past, no tradition, when everything’s basically exposed to the future, everything’s constantly flying away into the hole of the future, money is the next best thing. The gate and the mailboxes and the name were like pieces dropped off of real houses. In a spiritual sense they were the heaviest objects around. They helped to weigh the place down, on nights when the future hung its open mouth above us, and the years burned like paper in our dreams. 

From Marlen Haushofer’s Killing Stella (New Directions), translated from German by Shaun Whiteside:

Stella was one of the living. More than a person, she was like a big gray cat or a young deciduous tree. She sat at our table, thoughtless and innocent, waiting for fate. 

From Time of Silence by Luis Martín-Santos (NYRB Classics), translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush:

Who cares about dogs? Who could care less about a dog’s pain, when its mother couldn’t give a fig? It’s very true that nothing will come from this research into polyvinyl, since specialists in gleaming laboratories in all civilized countries throughout the world have already proved that a dog’s vital tissues won’t tolerate polyvinyl. But who knows what a dog from this neck of the woods can tolerate, a dog that doesn’t piss, a dog Amador stuffs with dry bread dunked in water? 

From Leonora Carrington’s first novel, The Stone Door (NYRB):

I galloped around the Palace thinking all the while of my loneliness and of the creature dressed in wool and smelling of cinnamon and dust. Try as I would I could not evoke his real presence and he remained a thought. The formula for this evocation is somewhere hidden inside of me, I feel small and ignorant and this pleases me not at all. I cannot accept this, I want to feel enormous and powerful. (I secretly believe that I am a goddess with very short moments of incarnation.)

From John Gregory Dunne’s Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season (McNally Editions):

I always cried at Catholic funerals. But ultimately church-going became like watching too many Rose Parades; year after year the same petaled floats, tea roses and floribunda and grandiflora and climbers and polyantha and perpetuals and damasks and moss roses and French roses and cabbage roses and musk roses and albas and Bourbons and Noisettes and China roses and sweetbriers and shrub roses and tea roses, millions and millions of petals of every variety and every hybrid and every color, but finally, only roses. One remembered the Rose Parade fondly, but with no real desire to go back next year. In this twilight of habit, we sliding Catholics were left with only belief, and there was the rub.

From Eloghosa Osunde’s Necessary Fiction (Riverhead): 

To break January in, we threw a seven-day open-house party starting on Boxing Day and busied our bodies with tokes on lines on bowls on pills on tabs on shots on shots on shots. No sleep; just casual passing out for a slice of time and then springing back to our feet because our favorite jam was playing, or because where the fuck was the last person we were talking to, and what even is this headache? It just made sense to do.

From Gary Shteyngart’s Vera or Faith (Random House):

She always looked forward to recess until it started. 

 

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, assistant editor

From Mark Polizzoti’s new translation of André Breton’s Nadja (NYRB Classics):

A certain attitude toward beauty necessarily results from this, beauty that is conceived here solely in terms of passion. It is in no way static, in other words encased in its “dream of stone,” lost for mankind in the shadow of Odalisques, behind those tragedies that claim to encompass only a single day; nor is it dynamic, in other words subject to that rampant gallop after which there is only another rampant gallop, in other words more scattered than a snowflake in a blizzard, in other words determined never to let itself be embraced, for fear of being confined … It is like a train ceaselessly lurching from the Gare de Lyon, but that I know will never leave, has never left. It is made of jolts and shocks, most of which are not significant but which we know will necessarily bring about a huge Shock … The morning paper can always bring me news of myself:

From Jeff Weiss’s Waiting for Britney Spears (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a memoir of his time as a tabloid journalist:

Love bludgeons me before I fully understand what it means. It requires only a caramel-blonde whip of hair, a harem dancer hip shimmy, a lashing of apricot arms, a dizzying 360-degree whirl, and a graceful floor slide. I saw the sign, an immaculate conception, a fated tarot. Only a higher power could have blessed me to bear witness to the taping of the “… Baby One More Time” video. 

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in the back, a book of Corinne Day’s photos on the set of Sofia Coppola’s the virgin suicides, out from MACK this month.

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, assistant editor

From Joan Copjec’s Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran: Corbin/Kiarostami/Lacan (MIT Press):

As Ishaghpour puts it in his essay “The True and False in Art,” “It would be fair to say that, according to Kiarostami, the whole world has just one wish: being photographed, appearing in a film, being on the screen. So much so, that it would be necessary to change Descartes’s formula into ‘I have an image, [therefore] I [am].’ ” Why should women be exempt from this elemental desire to have an image—a desire so elemental that even the God of Islam is acknowledged to have pined for one. For want of an image he was hidden even from Himself.

Those who protest against the assimilation of women to an image are right to do so, though it needs to be acknowledged that there is a critical difference between an image that assimilates what it depicts (or: reduces it to an object) and an epiphanic image. The latter—or “incorruptible”—form of the image performs an epiphanic function. It directs us to attend not merely to what it shows on its surface but also to what nestles in its shadow. One of the most famous illustrations of such an image is the painting of a veil by Parrhasios, which prompted those who looked at it to wonder what lay beneath it. The function of the image in this case is not merely to draw our attention to what is visible but also to what is not. 

 

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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, assistant editor

From Water by the Persian mystic Rumi (1207–1273), translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori (New York Review Books):

The Garden’s scent is a messenger,
arriving again and again,
inviting us in.

Hidden exchanges, hidden cycles
stir life underground.
What stirs the life in you?
The garden asks.

The garden thrives.
Invites us to do the same.

Saplings break through darkness—
ladders set against the sky.
Mysteries ascend. 

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