"'We can live any way we want,' she promises. 'People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting.'" 

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The Dry Season by Melissa Febos

 

"People like us had no talent for conversation in a faintly sterile minor key. Yet we were able to voice our truths in a minor cadence—or even a Schoenbergian discord. We stepped out of the preexisting frameworks and spoke our minds atonally."

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Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa

 

"And after the squeaking finally ceased, the loud howling outside the door continued for a long time."

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Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

 

"I write in the night, but I see not only the tyranny. If that were so, I would probably not have the courage to continue writing. I see people sleeping, stirring, getting up to drink water, whispering their projects or their fears, making love, praying, cooking something whilst the rest of the family is asleep, in Baghdad and Chicago...and I know that, despite the pain, the ingenuity of the survivors is undiminished, an ingenuity which scavenges and collects energy, and in the ceaseless cunning of this ingenuity, there is a spiritual value, something like the Holy Ghost."

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Hold Everything Dear by John Berger

 

"What is the "purpose" of our brief stay on earth—simply to experience the widest range of feelings?"

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How We Got Here by David Shields

 

"She could say of all the people she's met in life what they are and what awaits them: wandering or anchoring down, home or perpetual departure, verticality or the infinite horizon."

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Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro

 

"And this steady rhythm of living and working got into me, so that I felt part of it and had my place, a foot in both present and past; I was utterly content."

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A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

 

"The primary function of gender identity as a political concept—and, increasingly, a legal one—is to bracket, if not to totally deny, the role of desire in the thing we call gender."

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Authority by Andrea Long Chu

 

"In this full light, I saw that my first impression had been correct, he was handsome, perhaps even excessively so—his face would breed the kind of desire that would turn upon itself, too much to be useful to him, I had known such men and women."

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Audition by Katie Kitamura

 

"The simplest explanation, he said, was that Colombia, during the Spanish Conquest, saw a cornucopia of rare mutations from African, European, and Indigenous sources. It also suffered, during that same period, a number of genetic bottlenecks. In a bottleneck, a population shrinks due to some disaster—disease, war, genocide, or famine—leaving the surviving population with reduced genetic variation. If and when that population bounces back, rate variants that made it through the bottleneck are overrepresented."

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The Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure by Jennie Erin Smith

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