Fiction

The Golden State

" … and suddenly I have what I think may be my most important epiphany about motherhood which is that your child is not your property and motherhood is not a house you live in but a warren of beautiful rooms, something like Topkapı, something like the Alhambra on a winter morning, some well-trod but magnificent place you’re only allowed to sit in for a minute and snap a photo before you are ushered out and you’ll never remember every individual jewel of a room but if you’re lucky you go through another and another and another and another until they finally turn out the lights."

*

The Golden State, p. 257
By Lydia Kiesling
Published 2018 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

"Something flashed in the gloss of my eyeballs. I got close up to the mirror and looked very carefully. There I was, a tiny dark reflection of myself deep down in my right pupil. Someone said once that pupils were just empty space, black holes, twin caves of infinite nothingness. 'When something disappears, that’s usually where it disappears——into the black holes in our eyes.' I couldn’t remember who had said it."

*

My Year of Rest and Relaxation, p. 187
By Ottessa Moshfegh
Published 2018 by Penguin Press

An American Marriage

"But home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch. You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land."

*

An American Marriage, p. 4
By Tayari Jones
Published 2018 by Algonquin Books