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.