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 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.
—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor
From Byung-Chul Han’s The Spirit of Hope (Polity):
Acting out of fear is not a way of acting that supports a sustainable future, which would require a meaningful horizon and action that forms part of a narrative. Hope is eloquent. It narrates. Fear, by contrast, is incapable of speech.
From Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest is Silence (NYRB), translated by Aaron Kerner:
From the moment I saw it this letter drove me to reflect on the depths concealed by its apparent frivolity. What do we have here? I asked myself. Passion, jealousy, love, and an unquestionable disdain for art? Does this woman, I thought, actually lack an understanding of art? Is she incapable of appreciating anything beyond a bit of embroidery, an apple pie (or compote), a floral arrangement, or a hairdo teased in preparation for a party? All this the letter seemed to reveal with utter artlessness, but something about it continued to disturb me.
By this point the reader will have divined that that something was the word “breasts.”
Three times I was forced to transcribe it, for whenever I reached the word “breasts” in the course of my task I grew confused and put down “pests,” or “jests,” or “tests” instead, until I realized that something was happening to me around that word in particular and I ruminated on why precisely this word out of all of the rest should be the one to trip me up, and why the signatory, Lucy, spoke of legs, arms, and breasts rather than heads, elbows, and feet, and I realized that behind that exalted philosophical talk about the All was concealed an insinuation of something far more tangible—that is to say, graspable.
From Et Tu, Babe, collected in A Shimmering, Serrated Monster!: The Mark Leyner Reader (Back Bay Books), edited by Rick Kisonak:
I had once intended to write an entire novel while having to urinate very badly. I wanted to see how that need affected the style and tempo of my work. I had found, for instance, that when I’m writing about a character who’s in a Ph.D. program and I don’t have to urinate badly, I’ll have him do a regular three- or four-year program. But if I’m writing a novel and I have to urinate very very badly, then I’ll push the character through an accelerated Ph.D. program in perhaps only two years, maybe even a year.
From Lisa 2, v1.0 (Calamari Archive) by Nicholas Rombes:
The computer sits there innocently.
