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Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the <\/span><\/i>Review\u2019<\/span>s site. Often, we\u2019re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We often share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some of the curious, striking, strange, and wonderful bits we found, in books that are coming out this month. \u2014Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor<\/p>\n <\/span><\/i><\/p>\n From Kathryn Davis\u2019s <\/span>Versailles<\/span><\/i> (Graywolf):<\/span><\/p>\n I was a pretty girl; I glittered like the morning star. My red lips would open and it was anyone\u2019s guess what would come out. A burst of song. Something by Gluck, a pretty girl in pain maybe, impaled on the horn of the moon. The Kings of France, starting with Charlemagne. A joke.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n From N. H. Pritchard\u2019s <\/span>The Mundus <\/span><\/i>(Primary Information), a work originally begun in the sixties and described by its author as \u201ca novel with voices,\u201d \u201can allegorical romance, a poem in prose form,\u201d and an \u201cexploded haiku.\u201d Paul Stephens, in his afterword, recommends that it is best \u201cviewed, read out loud, meditated upon\u2014possibly chanted or even absorbed as a collective trance.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n From Izumi Suzuki\u2019s <\/span>Set My Heart On Fire<\/span><\/i> (Verso), first published in Japan in 1996 and translated by Helen O\u2019Haran:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cVery womanly thing to say. Women are such realists.\u201d Sabu had a different opinion to the comic-book artist.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n From Katherine Rundell\u2019s<\/span> Vanishing Treasures <\/span><\/i>(Doubleday):<\/span><\/p>\n Lemurs are strange in the way that the reclusive and wealthy are strange; having had the island of Madagascar to themselves evolve in, they have idiosyncratic habits. Male ring-tailed lemurs have scent glands on their wrists, and engage in \u201cstink-fighting,\u201d battles in which they stand two feet apart and wipe their hands on their tails, then shake the tail at their opponent, all the while maintaining an aggressive stare until one or the other retreats. It feels no madder than current forms of diplomacy. It\u2019s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n From Jane DeLynn\u2019s <\/span>In Thrall<\/span><\/i> (Semiotext(e)):<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI hope you don\u2019t hate me for saying this, but it\u2019s true \u2026 someday, way off in the future, when you\u2019ve moved far away from home, perhaps into a city you\u2019ve never been to (or maybe even heard of), a city perhaps where no Jews live\u2014for sometimes I see you in a strange country and at other times in a small town in California, a small town with white walls and no history\u2014you may miss [your parents], you may miss [their voices], and when you call home to hear it (out of your terrible loneliness), you\u2019ll be in New York City (though you\u2019re ten thousand miles away), and you\u2019ll turn into a child again, even if you\u2019re an old woman like myself. Yes, it\u2019s a terrible irony, but you\u2019ll miss that voice, you\u2019ll tell yourself you\u2019d do anything in the world to hear it again, even for a moment\u2014you\u2019ll wish for it perhaps more than you\u2019ve wished for anything you\u2019ve ever wished for in your life\u2014but even if you flew halfway around the world to hear it, even if you could unpack your bags and settle back on the Upper West Side, you could never hear it again, not really, for it belongs to your past, and you\u2019re moving, however much you want to avoid it, into your future, a future you can\u2019t even delay very much, for it\u2019s there, leaping at you, and you want that too! You want it and you don\u2019t want it\u2014this is how you always seem to feel about things\u2014I mean deep inside\u2014you want them and you don\u2019t want them\u2014except this one time, perhaps the only time in your life, when you\u2019ll want something utterly<\/em>\u2014with your whole being, and it will be this voice, the voice of your past, the voice of yourself. But you won\u2019t be able to retrieve it, nobody can retrieve it, for it\u2019s lost in the past where your childhood is, your real<\/em> childhood\u2014not the one you feel like you\u2019ve been living all your life (for, of course, you\u2019ll feel like a child all your life: who doesn\u2019t<\/em>?) and not the miserable childhood you tell<\/em> yourself you lived (what adult doesn\u2019t make a myth of his unhappy childhood to redeem the utter misery<\/em> that is adulthood?)\u2014but the real<\/em> childhood, the one that happened and the one that you, of course, can never remember: for it\u2019s stuck in the pores of your skin, it\u2019s lost in the marrow of your bones, it swirls around in your blood until it reaches every cell in your body, it flies into the air with every breath you take\u2014you can\u2019t know it because it\u2019s you<\/em>, there\u2019s nothing else<\/em> to know, and it will be this way forever<\/em>! And out there, amidst your bright-white buildings and strange flowering plants in the town that has no past, you won\u2019t be able to remember any of this, for the \u2018you\u2019 that was will have gone new places and dreamed new dreams (after a point there\u2019s no room for old ones)\u2014and then, my dear, and only then, will you know what it means to really cry.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Extracts from forthcoming books by Kathryn Davis, Jane DeLynn, N. H. Pritchard, Katherine Rundell, and Izumi Suzuki.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2527,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68804],"tags":[67827,883],"class_list":["post-168967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookmarks","tag-featured","tag-staff-picks"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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