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Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the\u00a0<\/i>Review\u2019s 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 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.
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\u2014Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor<\/i><\/p>\n
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From Olga Tokarczuk\u2019s <\/span>House of Day, House of Night <\/span><\/i><\/a>(newly reissued by Riverhead)<\/span>, <\/span><\/i>translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones:<\/span><\/p>\n He was often prone to falling into a mindless state, staring at the world in front of him as if it were a picture. Down below, people walked along the asphalt road, herding cows; dogs were running, a man burst into sudden laughter, little bells tinkled on the sheep\u2019s necks, skin itched, higher up a man carried a hare he\u2019d poached, he waved to someone, smoke from the chimneys drifted into the sky and birds flew to the west. This picture goes on forever; it seems to be eternal. It\u2019s a scene that people happen to, rather than it happening to people.<\/span><\/p>\n On the afternoon of New Year\u2019s Eve this young border guard, with a face as ruddy and glowing as a Bath bun, was riding his huge motorbike slowly through the snow.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n From Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida\u2019s <\/span>Three Stories of Forgetting<\/span><\/i><\/a> (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin:<\/span><\/p>\n He walked anonymously through the village of yesteryear. There was no greater consolation than to be nobody where he had been somebody. To call the houses he had called his own someone else’s. To see once more with old eyes shops, chimneys, barges, fishwives. No one came to shop doors to watch him go past. It wasn’t hatred or indifference. The faces on the quay announced another century, one that would never be his. What would the eyebrows, the eyelashes of the twentieth century look like? He wished he could see them. But like this: as a ghost who didn’t scare anyone and wasn’t interested in anything, on a scentless walk through the future.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n From Peter Handke\u2019s <\/span>The Ballad of the Last Guest<\/span><\/i><\/a> (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), translated from the German by Krishna Winston:<\/span><\/p>\n The bus had long since turned off the highway into the agglomeration. Without warning it kept turning, turn after turn. Yet it seemed as if after every third turn the street was heading out into the countryside again, toward the distant horizons, or, on the contrary, approaching something resembling the center, or one of the centers. Nothing of the sort, however: instead, each time, it ended up on a periphery, never the same one, but also not an off-putting or even hostile one, but rather, perhaps also because of the quite gentle turns, an (almost) friendly one, at least at first glance, an (almost) welcoming one. And it was striking that each of the many high-rise buildings stood all by itself, as did the next one, a lance-throw away, in the \u201cmiddle ground\u201d by reference to the one in the foreground\u2014in accord (almost) with the rhythm of all the high-rises in the agglomeration\u2014high-rises that at first sight stood \u201cout in the open,\u201d to paraphrase the expression used by a poet to describe a far less tall building from a previous century. It made sense that in this New Town, which spread across the landscape rather than completely filling it, the horizontal lines that crossed one another and headed off in different directions, at least those in the background, seemed to be welcoming him, the stranger, or the one who’d become a stranger here, in the form of mobile tangents\u2014local trains, streetcars, even Metro cars as they traversed their aboveground stretches on elevated tracks, all speeding along inaudibly yet uninterruptedly, to connect the most distant housing clusters to civilization.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n From Christian Schlegel\u2019s <\/span>The Blackbird<\/span><\/i><\/a>, a collection of poetry forthcoming from Beautiful Days Press:<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0i\u2019m a schoolteacher \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>would anyone like to<\/span><\/p>\n volunteer what they watch on youtube \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0when they\u2019re tired? \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0lex fridman<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0ok who is that \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0you don\u2019t know who lex fridman is? \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0he<\/span><\/p>\n works at mit he\u2019s a robotics influencer \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0an ai engineer \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0ok \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0what<\/span><\/p>\n does he talk about in his videos \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0he interviews smart people<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0cool what else do we watch on our phones that\u2019s substantial<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0south park clips \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0good ok \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0so i watch \u017ei\u017eek talks on<\/span><\/p>\n youtube \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0not to flex i also watch chiropractic videos \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 but that\u2019s a<\/span><\/p>\n different piece \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0so i was watching this \u017ei\u017eek clip the other day\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 and he was giving a<\/span><\/p>\n talk at google where they used to bring in philosophers to lecture before the crash<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0and he was talking about donald rumsfeld\u2019s categories of things that were<\/span><\/p>\n known or unknown during the iraq war \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 rumsfeld infamously gives<\/span><\/p>\n this press conference in the early days of the second iraq war \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0where he\u2019s trying to<\/span><\/p>\n describe the difficulties that american intelligence operatives such as they were<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0had \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0making sense of \u201cfacts on the ground\u201d \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0amid the \u201cfog<\/span><\/p>\n of war\u201d so rumsfeld says \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0look there are three types of knowledge \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0this from<\/span><\/p>\n \u017ei\u017eek \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0things we know we know so hussein is in charge of iraq \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0we know it<\/span><\/p>\n we know we know it \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0there are things we know we don\u2019t know<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0we don\u2019t know how many wmds there are in iraq \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0but we know that they\u2019re<\/span><\/p>\n there \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0we just don\u2019t know how many in what way \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0then there<\/span><\/p>\n are things we don\u2019t know \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0that we don\u2019t know and that\u2019s the really scary thing for<\/span><\/p>\n rumsfeld \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0and that was used as a pretext for all the terrible things that were done<\/span><\/p>\n but additionally there are \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0as \u017ei\u017eek points out those things \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0we don\u2019t know<\/span><\/p>\n that we know \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0and that\u2019s what i\u2019m going to talk about today<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 the things we don\u2019t know that we know \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n From Joe Brainard\u2019s <\/span>The Complete C Comics<\/a> <\/span><\/i>(reissued by New York Review Books), <\/span>with contributions from <\/span>John Ashbery, Frank O\u2019Hara, Kenneth Koch, Ted Berrigan, Barbara Guest, and others:<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/screenshot-2025-12-02-at-105743am-803x1024.jpg\")
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