Middle seat is a ham sandwich, and there is nothing to see out the reinforced windows, just the undigested blur of the nation.
John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead
I picked this up from a used bookstore while in DC last week, helping out my mom following a partial knee replacement. This is early on in the novel and it feels a little cheap to go with an opener, but it's really great. I love that the protagonist having this thought realizes further down the page that he hasn't eaten in a while.
Some other great sentences:
The families are noise and the kids chase each other around the pool and slip and he can smell the litigation like coming rain.
The night is clear and naked and swarming with so many anxious stars that it almost seems to him an invasion, a celestial troop movement auguring nothing good.
There were a lot more banger sentences but I didn't want this to get too long.
During the patrol, the [Black] Panthers stopped for their traditional smoothie break.
CBC news report on "The Black Panthers vs. ICE in America"
Submitted by Matthew.
Seeing as how the latter two are every bit as dead as competent magazine prose, conspiracy theories would appear to be very silly things indeed.
"The Ur-“Conspiracy”: History of a Pseudoconcept", Barrett Brown for The Paris Review
These walls do not have genders and they all think you suck.
"Revenge", Elisa Chavez in Seattle Review of Books
Submitted by Erin.
The seismometers at the end of the earth have names
Headline for a story on All Things Considered
If there’s something to the recession hypothesis behind Cloud Dancer, it’s that in the face of a precarious and increasingly fascist political reality, Pantone repackages color to consumers as a depoliticized mood, aesthetic, and vibe.
"Mama Don’t Take My Chromophobia Away", Lida Zeitlin-Wu for Los Angeles Review of Books
Submitted by Angela.
I would believe you if you told me that Luge Hogwarts was real, because the idea of how someone becomes a luge racer any other way seems as insane as “an owl told me to report to weird sled college.”
"TRL: EVERYBODY INTO THE MURDER SLEDS", Spencer Hall for the newsletter Channel 6
Submitted by Josh.
“Be more pervy,” my notes from the film’s screening include, and that’s a feeling that permeated the last 90 minutes of the film.
Review of Wuthering Heights by Kate Erbland for IndieWire
Let the cows have their murder suicide in peace.
Submitted by Dieter.
Florida Edith needs a cleaner backstory
"Florida Trip", Edith Zimmerman in her newsletter Drawing Links
Submitted by Mark.
To have a good and happy life what we all need more than anything else is what J.R.R. Tolkien called our “partner in shipwreck”.
"Flummoxed by My Open Epstein Tabs", Brad DeLong in his newsletter Grasping Reality
Submitted by Ed.
Mother was a rectangle maker—intricate weavings of copper, silicon, germanium, rendered in fine + brown lines.
She Will Last As Long As Stones, kathy wu
An everyday hour, the night, the lost twittering of birds.
Opacities, Sofia Samatar
Submitted by Manjula.
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