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Readings

Excerpts from the best and most bizarre new books, testimonies, government documents, journals, news reports, speeches, and letters.

These Little Worlds

From an essay that was scheduled to appear in the Spring 2024 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, Islands. The issue has been on hold since the magazine went on hiatus late…

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Hot Mess

From letters by visitors who had taken objects from national parks in Hawaii, collected in the art book Ah Ah, by Ryan Thompson, which was published last month by The…

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Thicket

From Concerning the Future of Souls, which will be published this month by Tin House. He hadn’t felt well when he woke up that morning but this was the case…

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Mathopotamia

From a March 1940 letter to her brother, André, collected in A Life in Letters, which will be published next month by Harvard University Press. Translated from the French by…

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Odd Odds

From a preprint study posted on the Cornell University open-access archive arXiv in October that was conducted by researchers at more than a dozen European universities. A group of forty-eight…

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The Approach of a Dangerous Fate

From The Heart in Winter, which will be published this month by Doubleday. On Wyoming Street in the evening a patent Irish stumbled by, some crazy old meathead in a…

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The Best I Can Do Is to Be Concrete

From a manuscript in progress. The best I can do is to be concrete, by which I mean cemented in place. By which I mean being the mean witch I…

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Tears and Pain

From messages seen in a video posted on social media in April by Karam Hassan. The messages were written by Palestinians on the walls of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. Translated…

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Dark Knights of the Soul

From Getting to Know Death, which will be published this month by Bloomsbury. I have been close to people who one day found themselves in the desperate place and didn’t…

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Faxing Poetic

From letters collected in The Letters of Seamus Heaney, which will be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dear Loving Man, All this is spilling out like a…

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Situation Vroom

From an October 2023 interview with President Biden, conducted by the special counsel Robert Hur and the deputy special counsel Marc Krickbaum, about the storage of classified documents in Biden’s…

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Doppelgänger

From My Body Is Paper, which will be published this month by City Lights. In 1996, Cuadros died of AIDS complications at the age of thirty-four. I had been breathing…

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A Suit with an Extra Pair of Pants

From A Question of Belonging, which was published last month by Archipelago Books. Translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner. A long time ago, Atilio and I lived in an…

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Sanctuary

From a little bump in the earth, which was published in April by Copper Canyon Press. I wasn’t proud of my aim at the bird I kept missing & then…

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Dog Gone Shame

From Sad Planets, which will be published this month by Polity. The first female in space was not, as is commonly thought, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, but Laika the dog,…

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Jim and Eilis

From Long Island, which was published last month by Scribner. When Martin entered, the bar was empty. Jim served him a bottle of Guinness, then went into the stockroom at…

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Film Comment

From Facebook posts written by the director Paul Schrader since 2021. an observation about film economics. The post-nickelodeon decision to monetize motion pictures (squeezing large numbers of patrons into unair-conditioned…

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Earth From

From Sleepers Awake, which will be published next year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.         The murmur of an um         and an er, etc.,         sustains the “apparent present”         through “stains in…

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Coming to Terms:
Adapted from “The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine”

Adapted from “The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine,” a paper that was published in February by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. More than two years into Russia’s invasion,…

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The Shawshank Renovation

From descriptions that appear on the websites of former jails that have been converted to hotels. liberty hotel, boston In 1973, prisoners incarcerated in the Charles Street Jail revolted because…

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Whine-One-One

From transcripts of calls made to the Welsh Ambulance Service in 2023.   operator: Tell me exactly what’s happened. caller: Yesterday evening, we had some kebab, and I might have…

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To Be Born in Beit Jala

From Strangers in Light Coats: Selected Poems, 2014–2020, which was published in November by Seagull Books. Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger. I was born into the Christian households…

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Pearl of Sandwich

From The Core of an Onion, which was published in November by Bloomsbury. James Beard once wrote, “I can easily make a whole meal of onion sandwiches, for to me…

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VPN for Vendetta

From an affidavit filed in 2022 by an FBI agent in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. In November 2023, “J.B.,” the defendant, was sentenced to eighteen…

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A People I Know

From God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, edited by Hilton Als, which was published in March by Dancing Foxes Press and the Brooklyn Museum. I met…

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The Hard Hill

From This Strange Eventful History, which will be published this month by W. W. Norton. He could hear his wife, Barbara, now in the other room, getting ready for his father’s funeral.…

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Blade Point Average

From a civil complaint filed in February against Albuquerque Public Schools, in New Mexico. On the morning of May 2, 2022, a teacher brought two swords with her into her…

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May

From Big Stupid Face, a manuscript in progress. Its usual way moves in with a privacy that rips out plantings ragged and diseased a leap exhilarating away in unheard-of petals.…

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