Will > Books: fiction‎ (429)

The closer they got to him, the slower they walked. None of them spoke. Glinting bluebottles and smaller flies circled the boy. His hair was dark,

The closer they got to him, the slower they walked. None of them spoke. Glinting bluebottles and smaller flies circled the boy. His hair was dark, his skin very pale. He wore a deep blue shirt, a color Duncan would later call cobalt, black shorts, and what appeared to be long red socks. At the local private school, the younger boys wore bright red knee socks, and for the briefest instant, Zoe thought, Oh, he’s in uniform. A few steps closer she grasped the nature of the red.

An old schoolmate…described how one day he had come home from school on a summer afternoon and at the bottom of the garden in his tiny, tiny village, a place where no one ever locked their doors he found the body of a woman who’d been murdered. Her legs were covered in blood and his first thought was that she was somehow wearing the uniform of the local schoolboys, who wore bright red knee socks. And he was only in her presence for less than ten seconds, before he fled, but those ten seconds changed his life…The story made a profound impression on me, both because of the bucolic setting and the shock of it. And I think of someone’s life jumping the tracks because of something almost random, completely unexpected. - from the Chris Castellani interview

I believe there are essential lies, heroic lies. And I’m very interested in the relationship between secrets and lies. Keeping a secret, however innocent, often seems to require lying. - from the Lithub interview

Looking at her bright top, her faded jeans, he recalled his father’s admonition (to watch over her). She had changed so much in the last year, and in the few days since they knelt in the field, she had changed again. Perhaps something had traveled from Karel’s arm into her outstretched hand. He knew of several boys at school who liked her. Would they stop liking the new Zoe? Or like her even more? He suspected the latter.

For a lot of years the only way I used to know how to get control of my life was to get mad. It was the only way I knew how to stand up for myself.

For a lot of years the only way I used to know how to get control of my life was to get mad. It was the only way I knew how to stand up for myself.
--Lynette

The point is you can’t be too greedy.
--The Future 45th President of the United States of America

The foundation of the house was poured in 1922 using faulty concrete. During the winter rains, it leaked in a half-dozen places. Over the years small sections of the concrete wall had grown soft, the cement beginning to crumble. Their first landlord hired a company to patch the foundation, but he had died, and his son, who lived on the coast near Astoria, inherited the house. He hadn’t raised the rent in eleven years with the understanding that they wouldn’t call him for repairs. So they didn’t, and the basement was left to leak.

Portland is changing so rapidly it’s hard to know what to think. It used to be a haven for artists. When I moved here it was cheap and people would come out to see original music. It was lucky. It’s still great, it’s a great city, but it’s too expensive. I don’t know where all the money’s coming from, but it’s coming and it’s hard on the working class and the artists. The working class people get pushed out to the suburbs and the artists just move to different cheaper cities. - from the Americana UK interview

I’m fifty-seven years old and I still buy my clothes at Goodwill. It’s a little late for me to care about building a future…You don’t know what it’s like. Other women my age are going on vacations with their grandkids, they’re talking about retirement plans and investments. Me, I haven’t taken a vacation since the time we went to San Francisco, and that was over fifteen years ago…I’ll never retire and that’s just a goddam fact….why do I have to sacrifice more than I already have? Why do I have to have a debt hanging over me for the rest of my life?

It was January and raining and forty-one degrees when Lynette and her brother walked across the lawn to her red 1992 Nissan Sentra. She opened the passenger-side door and Kenny got in. She put on his seat belt and walked around to the driver’s side. The car started on the second try. The heater hadn’t worked in a year and their breath fogged the windows inside the car. She drove with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a rag she used to wipe the condensation and steam from the windshield.

poverty is not an island; it is a borderland. There’s quite a lot of movement in the economic fringes, especially across the fuzzy boundary between the poor and the working class. Those who live in the economic borderlands are pitted against one another by policy that squeezes every possible dime from the wallets of the working class at the same time that it cuts social programs for the poor and absolves the professional middle class and wealthy of their social obligations.

I just panicked and tried to get all the money that was owed me. I made a lot of mistakes and got greedy.

When you look at a person’s life it’s easy to pass judgement if you don’t know them. The more you know the more you understand. Sometimes you find out what a person has gone through and you’re surprised they are even upright. Other times it’s the opposite, some people just seem to invite or continuously stumble into hard times. I always try to show both sides in my songs and novels. I’ve always been interested in how people can get beat up day after day and still get by, often times with great dignity. The struggle to overcome one’s own ditches has always interested me. - from the Americana UK interview

They had been traveling for days, first by plane, and then by train and ferry, and now again by train, for their destination was a place at the edg

They had been traveling for days, first by plane, and then by train and ferry, and now again by train, for their destination was a place at the edge of the world, in the far north of a northern country, and not easily gained.

For a long time she had been staring absently out the window, mesmerized, it seemed, by the endless expanse of tundra, but she suddenly recoiled when the train entered the dark woods as if the trees brushing the sides of the carriage might reach in and scratch her.

There was so much he wished he could do for her, so much he wished he could give to her, but nothing he tried to do, or give, ever seemed to reach her. It was as if she wore a shield that deflected all of his love, an armor that protected her from anything he gave.

The train. He turned to see it slowly moving, so slowly that for a moment he thought it must be the darkness moving behind it, but then he knew it was the train, for he could see his wife leaning forward, looking out of the still-opened door, her white face silently surprised, and for a second it felt like death to him, like how one must let one’s beloved depart this world, gliding silently slack-faced into the snow-dark.

The bartender was a young man, tall and dark, vaguely Asiatic, and remarkably stiff, as if he had been born with fewer joints than normal.

You’re lost, aren’t you?
Yes, said the woman I am.
The thing to remember is that we’re all lost, said Livia Pinheiro-Rima. We’re living in a dark time. No one can find their way.

For his heroic service, Cher Ami was awarded the French Croix de Guerre with palm. He was returned to the United States and died at Fort Monmouth, N.J

For his heroic service, Cher Ami was awarded the French Croix de Guerre with palm. He was returned to the United States and died at Fort Monmouth, N.J. on June 13, 1919, as a result of his wounds. Cher Ami was later inducted into the Racing Pigeon Hall of Fame in 1931, and received a gold medal from the Organized Bodies of American Pigeon Fanciers in recognition of his extraordinary service during World War I. - from the Smithsonian

…in a contest against passion, truth always makes a poor showing.

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Even the few who had come through the incident largely unhurt looked like shades; greeting the new arrivals with yellowed grins and vacant eyes.

Each man was the miserable monarch of a kingdom that squirmed with vermin, one that consisted of the dirt and a bit of sky each one could see from the dirt, of their feet in their boots in the mud—a kingdom indistinguishable from a grave.

Battle was said to harden a man—during my youth I’d heard this stated in the same offhand tones used to discuss first Communions and debutante balls—but in my case there had been no hardening, only a constant effort to hold together despite proliferating cracks.

Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away
- from Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away
- from Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones

I grew up on the edge of a hiking trail surrounded by woods and it was deeply formative for me. When I started writing, I found I kept coming back to those woods and trails. For me it is the site of my first yearnings and loss, the home I can never get back to. It is also a geography that resonates with other stories. We were always conscious not just of the Revolutionary War but the Lenape stories connected to the topography. It felt like hallowed ground and we spent an inordinate amount of time in those woods. It became, for me, an imaginative landscape, a place I can still conjure, the turns of the trail, how the light falls through the canopy, the tree roots that break through the surface. - from the Blue Nib interview

…as I walked toward Sage’s, I listened to the click of crickets at the wood’s edge, the slight whisper of trees, the sounds of the mountain, as if there were another frequency to hear and to be moved by. I wondered if one day I would have the same wrenching longing for this place that my father had for the sounds he’d heard growing up.

My father, as an Irish immigrant in America, loved literature. He was a landscaper and we’d be in his truck and he’s start reciting something. He’d recite lines from The Deserted Village from Oliver Goldsmith. The Song of Wandering Aengus was also one he recited a lot. My father would have such awe of these words and the power of words to transform you emotionally but also words to transform a situation. - from the Dodging the Rain interview

I walked down Horseshoe Trail toward the Kingdom, a secret fort Sage and I had made several summers before. Ahead of me was the crooked tree, our marker for leaving the path to circle into the Kingdom from the back, a routine we had so that there would never be a trace of track or footfall for anyone else to find. We imagined that the crooked tree was one of the ones Indians had used as signposts along the trail to signal where there was good hunting or soft ground for shelter. It was an oak that had started to grow upright, but suddenly the trunk made a complete right angle for two or three feet and then grew straight again. Before the Kingdom ever existed, Dad showed me the tree. He said it might have been a marker, but it could also have been caused by a bigger tree falling on the oak when it was young and then over time the bigger tree rotted and fell apart. The young tree survived but was left with this strange shape.

I often think I write more about being a child and the absence of a mother and wanting a mother. The earth maybe in a way is mothering me. - from the Dodging the Rain interview

Beside us, the shadows of dogwoods blurred in the dark as my mother kept driving, each tree hemmed in a halo of white where the bracts had fallen.

Maybe my mom was right about me when she said I wasn’t happy, but what she doesn’t understand is that since the age of fifteen, I’ve never even dar

Maybe my mom was right about me when she said I wasn’t happy, but what she doesn’t understand is that since the age of fifteen, I’ve never even dared to want to be happy. I’m just trying to stay alive.

For a moment, everything is calm and I face the horizon. I watch a monster wave gathering power until it looms five feet above me, hissing. I hold my breath as the wave crashes over me and then I am plunged into darkness. Now I am just one other small thing among a million other things, spinning and twisting beneath the water’s surface. The water isn’t so blue under here, it’s blacker and murkier and I’m drifting and my lungs are bursting and it’s simultaneously the most alive and the closest to darkness that I’ve ever been.

Similar to her novel’s protagonist, Berman grew up in both London and Los Angeles. While in London, Berman worked in the entertainment industry, for Sony Music, where she admits she observed first-hand the abuse of power among those at the top. “I saw examples of ‘casual’ everyday sexism,” she says. “The particularly pervasive type I didn’t even always register at the time, right up to much more sinister behavior that was swept under the carpet, and I knew that this must also be happening across every industry in the world.”

His narrow tie and pocket square were both daffodil yellow, a colour that brought out the gold hue of his eyes, deep-set below groomed brows.
As he

His narrow tie and pocket square were both daffodil yellow, a colour that brought out the gold hue of his eyes, deep-set below groomed brows.
As he came toward her he extended his right arm to check the time on a wide gold watch. In the shift of fabric, Joan saw dark hair dense on his too-white skin. He met her eyes and then smiled with so much sharp in it, something in Joan reacted like she’d taken a punch with the promise of more.

“My, what big teeth you have,” she said aloud.

I belong to the Métis Nation on the Georgian Bay. We used to live on Drummond Island and were then forcibly removed—when the island was being annexed to the US—to the shores of the bay across from the town of Penetanguishene. That land then became very valuable as “cottage country.” We’re only one-and-a-half hours from Toronto with its wealthy weekenders. And we were moved again, away from the water. Now we largely reside in the French/Métis town of LaFontaine, just up the road, on less valuable land.
These removals and relocations of a culture are specific to my community, although experienced in different ways by all Indigenous people. It’s part of our stories. And it’s a huge piece of why we share stories and keep that history intact, just as we’ve kept our culture intact. There must always be connection to nation when we tell stories. - from the Publishing Perspectives interview

“There’s lots of ways to become one.” She counted on her fingers. “Being attacked by a rogarou, mistreating women, betraying your people…that’s the ones we know around here, anyways.”

You know all these projects have to go through approvals, right?” he said
Why would she know this? But, “Yeah.”
“The only real threat to the project—to our jobs—are the Indians. They’re the ones with the goddamned rights, I guess. Always protesting and hauling us into court…the missions are good at changing the way people see shit.. Course it helps if you can hook one or two of the powerful ones—chiefs and whatnot, especially the ones willing to take the company cheque, and give speeches about moving on with things…”

She could hear the congregation singing from here, sounding like a circle of wolves under the moon.

It’s what all good parents tell their children. And yet what does it really amount to? A hostage to fortune. It’s a promise you have to make, and o

It’s what all good parents tell their children. And yet what does it really amount to? A hostage to fortune. It’s a promise you have to make, and one you must do your best to believe in, because what else is there?
It’s going to be ok.
Yes, I think about that a lot.
How every good parent says it, and how often they’re wrong.

Most of Gritten was saturated with poverty, and the view through the bus window was so drab that it was sometimes difficult to tell the empty premises from the occupied. I wanted nothing more than to escape from here—but it was hard to imagine it ever happening. The place had a gravity that held whatever was dropped where it fell. That included people.

…there was something especially beaten down about Gritten. Despite the sunlight, the air seemed drab and gray, like an old wet cloth half wrung out. As she looked out at the dilapidated neighborhoods she drove through, it was difficult to shake the sensation that the place was cursed in some way—that there was something poisonous in the ground here, rooted in the history of the place, that kept the land barren and the people dead inside.

Lucid dreams are when you wake up in a dream while remaining asleep. I was obsessed with them as a teenager and have remained so to an extent as an adult. The appeal was always the idea of escape: of being in control of the world and able to do anything you want…I thought they were fertile ground to explore — that isolated teenage boys in a drab community might seize on them as means of escape. And that things could become sinister very quickly, especially if one of them began manipulating the others. - from the Bookub interview

Like I suspect a lot of writers, I was fascinated by a crime that occurred in Wisconsin in 2014 where two young girls attempted to murder one of their friends. The girls had become obsessed with a figure known as Slender Man and had created this fantasy world between them, to the point they believed a sacrifice would allow them to escape the real world and join him. Slender Man is of course an entirely fictional figure, but a whole subculture has grown up around him. My first thought was “how could anybody really believe this?” — but then I remembered how alienated and lonely you can feel when you’re young, the imaginative games you play and the way those can take hold, and I also started reading more about shared delusional disorder, in which two or more individuals begin to believe the same extraordinary things. (view spoiler)[ Trump voters? (hide spoiler)] - from the BookBub interview

If you’re going to write about a character confronting something that happened in childhood, and about how it’s impacted them in the present, it’s inevitable you’re going to end up looking at all the factors that shaped them. And so in subsequent drafts, Paul’s mother just made more of her presence felt, until — in some ways — their relationship became the heart of the book. - from the BookBub interview

The volume dropped a notch, the quiet rush of the real world fading away behind us. The silence in the woods was eerie, and not for the first time I found myself glancing around as I trailed behind, my heart thrumming with the strange sensation you have when it feels like you’re being watched.

Florence was not on that boat, would never arrive in France. He would not find her on the shores of the English Channel or at the Hygeia [pool] or

Florence was not on that boat, would never arrive in France. He would not find her on the shores of the English Channel or at the Hygeia [pool] or even on the beaches of Atlantic City. He looked over at Stuart, who was openly weeping as he watched the boat disappear from view. Maybe Joseph’s daughter was to be found in the people who loved her.

The story of Florence Adler and her family is based on the true story of a young woman named Florence Lowenthal. She was my great, great aunt. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Florence’s drowning or about the family’s decision to keep her death a secret from her older sister, who was pregnant and on hospital bedrest. My mother and grandmother spoke of the decision—unequivocally—as the right thing to do, but I always wondered how that secret affected both mother and daughter and whether there might have been another way forward. - from the B&N bookclub version

Children could be so mean. She [Esther] remembered thinking so when she was raising her own girls. They were often too honest, the words they chose too blunt. Their worlds were big and bold and colorful but they were not yet able to distinguish that colors had values, that words had nuance. They described the people around them as old or young, ugly or beautiful, fat or thin, never recognizing that there were kinder, gentler, more forgiving words that lay in between. Sometimes, when Gussie talked about Florence’s death, so matter-of-factly, Esther couldn’t help but feel like she’d been cut open, left exposed.

“You know how you change yourself into a different person?”
“How?”
“This is gonna sound cheesy, but.” He blushed. “What they say in there, it’s true

“You know how you change yourself into a different person?”
“How?”
“This is gonna sound cheesy, but.” He blushed. “What they say in there, it’s true. You change by making one decision you wouldn’t have made before. You walk into the meeting. Even going to the meeting and leaving before it starts. It’s something. One decision at a time. You are what you choose, right? All you have to do is choose different.”

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How much can something change before it becomes something else?

I wanted to write a book about amnesia that was a story not about finding out about the past but about building a new life from scratch, and trying to figure out who you would be if you had no memories, and no baggage, and no obligations. For me it was a chance to explore the science of memory, the history of psychology… - from Bookreporter

…can you discuss the various influences on your book?
Bach fugues. General Hospital. Abandoned mental asylums. The hysterics of the Salpêtrière. Dropping out of grad school. Growing up in the Philly suburbs…Loneliness. Rage. Paris. Ongoing existential confusion about what it means to be an adult woman without any of the supposed trappings (partner, kid, house, etc.) of adulthood. - Q/A from Lit Hub interview

What kind of symptom wants to find its own cure?

fugue
/fyo͞oɡ/
noun
noun: fugue; plural noun: fugues
Music - a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts
Psychiatry - a state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy

Benjamin said the fugue was like the self: frugal subjects inverting, subverting, transforming over time, but always, somehow, ineffably and fundamentally the same. He said the fugue was like the mind, rigid rules imposed on finite elements spawning an infinity of combinatorial possibility, a generative complexity from which arose thought, beauty, human consciousness. He said fugue was a junction of reason and unreason, enlightenment rationalism fused with renaissance mysticism, a limited space where finite met infinite. He said Bach used music to encode the divine—like our neurons, Benjamin said, our axons and dendrites, our neurotransmitters, every mind its own creator.

Lizzie had puzzled over this line from the Confessions more than any other. Any duration is divisible into past and future: the present occupies no space. And yet Augustine also said the past and future were only figments. Consequence: there is no now, there are no thens. There is only memory and imagination, no differential of reality wedged between.

Memories make us who we are. They create our worldview in ways we hardly realize. Like a character made of Legos, we're built of blocks of memory that all fit together to form our consciousness. How can it be otherwise? - Aug 8, 2017 – Psychology Today

“When will you have achieved all your ambitions, Mrs. Pemberton?” she asked, as others jostled around them.
“When the world and my will are one,” S

“When will you have achieved all your ambitions, Mrs. Pemberton?” she asked, as others jostled around them.
“When the world and my will are one,” Serena answered.

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The mountain lion was the first to depart the valley. The front paw lost years back to a trap’s steel teeth was warning enough. As the trees began to fall, others followed: black bear and bobcat, otter and mink, some in pairs, some singly. Then beaver and weasel, deer and muskrat, groundhog and fox. After them raccoon and rabbit, opossum and chipmunk, squirrel and vole, deer mouse and shrew . . .

One thing I want to do is for landscape and my characters to be inextricably bound together. I believe the landscape people live in has to affect their psychology. - from the Transatlantica interview

In a sense, I’m writing a current that runs through time in those stories. And, also, paradoxically time is a kind of geography as well: it is also a way of showing people in much different cultural mindsets, even within a specific culture, and thus another way to probe for the universal within a specific cultural landscape.

If the language were not so beautiful and sublime, particularly in a play such as King Lear, the experience would be unbearable. What I’m trying for in my work—it’s up to the reader to decide if I do—is the sublime. I want my work to take the reader to that place. And I think you can do that with that juxtaposition of language and violence. - from the Transatlantica interview

I think I tend to use maimed characters with the idea that the world they inhabit is wounded. - from the Transatlantica interview

The women would bring food enough to get Rebecca and the children through the winter. Men would bring axes and the surrounding woods would sound like gunshots as the honed metal struck in the November air. All day the women would cook and tend fires. Children would gather kindling, then scuff among ashes for the iron nails that had secured the shingles. Everyone would work until dusk, then return the next day to help more. Ira Wilkey might or might not say We will get through this together, but that was understood. They were neighbors.

When Brent was growing up, his father would point out how a plumber in Brevard had done shoddy work but then gone out of business, or how a county clerk embezzled money for three years but ended up in prison. It catches up with you, son, he’d say. But plenty did get away with it, Brent knew. All you had to do was look at the recession, which almost caused him and his father to lose everything. The silk-tied crooks who’d done it weren’t arrested and no one pretended they ever would be. People like that got away with anything. Get caught robbing folks, all you had to do was pay back part of what you stole. Turn a million people into drug addicts, you didn’t spend a day in jail.

Four congregation members on his porch, Marvin Birch at the head. They do not want him to baptize Gunter. He says there is a chance that the baptism may cleanse his soul, even if he does not really expect it to do so. And if he refuses, he will force Eliza [Pearl’s mother] and Pearl to walk in the freezing cold to another preacher much farther away, endangering their health.

Trout have to live in a pure environment unlike human beings; they can’t live in filth! And so I think there is a kind of wonder; to me, they’re incredibly beautiful creatures…when such creatures disappear, we have lost something that cannot be brought back. - from the Transatlantica interview

I think people in mountains tend to feel very close to that place. … There’s almost the sense that the mountains are rising up around them, protecting them, almost like a womb. There’s a sense of security in a way. I think that also at times it can be oppressive. There’s a sense of mountains looming over people, reminding them how small and brief their lives are. I find it interesting to see what I can do with that as a writer. - from the Daily “Yonder interview

Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I’ve learned about poetry—the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible—but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel’s length, satisfies the reader. - from The Daily Beast interview

He headed west on Highway 19, the directions on the passenger seat. The leaves were off the trees now, revealing time-worn swells so unlike the wild, seismic peaks and valleys beloved by European Romantics such as Pernhart and Friedrich. Sturm und Drang. Yet the Appalachians were daunting in their uniformity, a vast wall, unmarked by crevices that might provide an easy path out.

In the coming days, conditions will continue to deteriorate. Emergency services and other public safety nets will be stretched to their breaking po

In the coming days, conditions will continue to deteriorate. Emergency services and other public safety nets will be stretched to their breaking points, exacerbated by the wily antagonists of fear, panic, misinformation, a myopic, sluggish federal bureaucracy further hamstrung by a president unwilling and woefully unequipped to make the rational, science-based decisions necessary; and exacerbated, of course, by plain old individual everyday evil.

I happened to be in England for my first time ever doing some book events. I was sitting on a train and I started writing in my notebook. I thought about some of my previous novels, most of which sort of take the horror trope and try to look at it in a different way, or if not a different way — I try to maybe ground that story in reality. I wrote down ‘zombie.’ I was like, ‘Oh, how would I do that?’
When I first asked myself, ‘How would I read this in reality?’ the rabies virus instantly occurred to me. So, I had some of the science there that I wanted to have the characters deal with. I tried to take real rabies and just move up the speed of infection rate. - from the Rollingstone interview

I had no contacts in the CDC or anything like that. I really wanted to focus on what it would be like at a small suburban hospital — a local outbreak. My sister is a nurse at Beth Israel Hospital in downtown Boston, so most of my research on what the response would be was through her. I got to see what some hospitals’ response plans would be. - from the Rollingstone interview

While the speed with which this virus infects is terrifying, it shouldn’t prevent us from containing it. If anything, given how quickly people succumb to the virus, if we can maintain a proper quarantine and isolation, we should be able to contain the outbreak. But that presumes people do not panic, that correct information and instruction are disseminated efficiently to the public, that the federal government follows the CDCs recommendations to be proactive with vaccine, and not reactive…We should be offering prophylaxis to whoever comes through these doors.”
“Do we have enough vaccine to do that?”
“No, we don’t.”

A woman shouts from above, “She had great power and was dreaded by all the world.” The door slams shut and then swings open without a pause. “Surrounded by a high wall,” she says sing song, lilting at “high” and separating “wall” into two syllables. Her voice is the same tone and pitch as the alarm and it sounds like there are two of her. The woman continues shouting between the piston like opening and closing of the door. “Let it cost what it will cost.”

…it will burrow, digging like a nasty tick; it will migrate; and it will return all but encouraged and welcomed in a country where science and forethought are allowed to be dirty words, where humanity’s greatest invention—the vaccine—is smeared and vilified by narcissistic, purposeful fools [the most dangerous kind, where fear is harvested for fame, profit, and self-esteem…

Maybe a small self-tweak. I do missing driving a stick (I currently drive a hybrid) but that Paul and me don't share an affinity for old tech and things that break down easily.

My favorite songs tend to be short, fast, and a mix of hopeful and melancholy. It was the vibe I wanted to go for with this book.

There is nothing so disturbing as a creature born to flight being bound to dull lifelessness.

A nameless s

There is nothing so disturbing as a creature born to flight being bound to dull lifelessness.

A nameless sadness, the fading away of the birds. The fading away of the animals. How lonely it will be here, when it’s just us.

The sea for her is one of the great loves of her life. Maybe it’s the family she never had. She feels more connected to her body, and weightless, and almost able to fly like the birds she loves. - from the -WriterUnboxed interview

Niall is absolutely symbolic of the birds for Franny. He represents the idea that you can study what you love without taking away from the magic in those things. - from the Dead Darlings interview

I tried for Niall, like I did for my mother. I really did. But the rhythms of the sea’s tides are the only things we humans have not yet destroyed.

It was really important to me to write the moments in Franny’s past that make her who she is, and for the reader to be able to experience those moments on an intimate level with her, because I felt that this would allow readers to connect more deeply with her and what drives her through the story. There’s also a lot of tension to be built in using suspension and mystery—you leave clues peppered throughout and only reveal information at moments that will create catharsis for your readers. - from the Amazon interview

I didn’t want to write a dystopian novel about the physical impacts of climate change, such as what would become of our food supply. I wanted this to be an existential look at the way the loss of the animals would make us feel, and I think this was a refusal of the idea that humans are the most important things on this planet, and that everything exists in service to us. I wanted the world I drew to look almost identical to the world today, apart from that one major difference, hoping that this would be a more confronting way to predict how close a future without animals really is. - from the Amazon interview

A shiver of delight finds me as we set out into the dark water. We hug the coast, traveling north by the ceaseless circling light of the lighthouse. The salty smell of the sea and the sound of its crash, the sway of the waves and the black abyss of its depths, the reaching dark of it, up to where it meets the inky velvet sky pricked through with glitter. With the stars reflected in the water we could be sailing through the sky itself; there is no end to it, no end to the sea or the sky but a gentle joining together.

“You ever get the feeling,” she said…”that somebody else already did all this shit? That we’re, like, just watching it happen?”

“You ever get the feeling,” she said…”that somebody else already did all this shit? That we’re, like, just watching it happen?”

Short, thin, with narrow shoulders. The head just a little too big for that slight body, skull-like, all forehead and cheekbones, narrow as a trowel at the mouth.

If she had a choice, if she’d learned anything tonight, she would never speak to any of them again. But she knew, here, too, that this wasn’t how things would work out. She would find a way to call Stacy, and later find a way to ask Wolfboy’s forgiveness. And inside she would hate them both a little for knowing her too long, for not letting her change, not letting her find out who she really was. What she was, what she wanted to be, or what she wanted others to see in her was that song “Pretty Vacant” by the Sex Pistols, just emptied out and gone, as if someone better than Ted or Chris or anyone ever asked her, that’s what she would say and if they laughed, she would beat them to the ground like she had Wolfboy. Or she wouldn’t. Of course she wouldn’t.

I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. In the late ’80s a mall was built in the next town over, and at its center — as far as I was concerned — was this dark arcade where I would occasionally run into people I knew from school or others of my age from nearby towns. I feel like in my pre-teen imagination the place was a kind of salon for dorks like me. Of course, I’d only have 15 or 20 minutes to roam around wasting quarters while my mom was looking at shoes or something. But it’s buried deep in there, and through that memory I discovered the character of Debbie, who is much cooler than I ever was, and much tougher. - from the Bookweb interview

Originally, he’d pictured retiring at fifty-nine to be filled with travel and projects around the house. Instead he’d spent most of his time puttering from room to room and getting on his wife’s nerves. She wasn’t used to him being around all day…what he really wanted to tell her he couldn’t put together in words. Something about how he missed her so desperately, how it seemed anymore they were strangers passing on a sidewalk, how he’d started to itch with this feeling that he’d wasted all his life doing next to nothing.

As she spoke about it all, he began to see it in his mind, and as it formed, he felt a warm glow at the base of his neck. Here was a dream, yes, and the two of them, connected to it only by hearsay, frolicked in its possibilities. A town was more like a family, spreading out in all directions, changing its neighboring towns like falling dominoes. The vision of this better place seemed so easy to make true, and he had to stop himself from reaching out and taking her hand in his. To his surprise they had already become friends.

The image I kept in my head as I wrote and revised was of a painting with a foreground and background. In the foreground are these characters in each of their stories, but looming behind them is this shared background…this structure allowed me to create a sense of characters flowing through history, absorbed in their personal lives even though we (readers, I mean) can see and understand that history, those bigger shifts happening around and to them. - from the Vol. 1 Brooklyn interview

He looked up into the deep vastness above, hoping for a shooting star to arc earthward, something he could take home as a sign. But there was only the chill in the air and the big country around him, floating loose, unmoored, starved for meaning.

An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind - Buddh

An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind - Buddha

The beginning I know for sure. Once upon a time, My father went to the Levitation Center. I also know the next part: and he never came back.

They were slick-finish girls, cat-eye girls, hot-blood girls. They were girls who reveled. They were girls who liked boys and back seats, who slid things that weren’t theirs into tight pockets, who lit fires and did doughnuts in the high school parking lot. They were girls who left marks. They were girls who snuck. Girls who drank whiskey and worse by the waterfront…They were girls who ran away, who inked their own arms with needles and ballpoint pens, who got things pierced below the neck. (none of them named Heather, as far as I can recall)

Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals- Buddha

…she seemed to have sprung from the ground, as much a part of the landscape as the rock beneath her thighs, as unconcerned and constant as the punishing heat itself.

If I had known what was going to happen that summer, maybe I would have paid more attention to Harriet
or
Just look at what happened that summer. Look at me now.
or
I couldn’t have known that by the end of summer, one of us would be erased completely, blacked out, as though something had spilled over the photograph…
And so on

No one saves us but ourselves - Buddha

Do you know how many times I’ve had to do this? Forget healing, my specialty should be having my life destroyed and then being forced to rebuild fr

Do you know how many times I’ve had to do this? Forget healing, my specialty should be having my life destroyed and then being forced to rebuild from nothing.

---------------------------------------

Yet everything was just a touch off. There were empty spaces where conjured buildings should have stood, ugly pockmarks on the skyline. The brass walls were tarnished, the edifices—on closer inspection—riddled with missing bricks and blackened mortar. Defying any weather pattern Nahri knew, somehow the eastern half of the island was draped in snow while the sun scorched the western half so fiercely small fires smoldered in the scrubby hills. A hazy black cloud revealed itself to be a swarm of flies, and the ruined Citadel still lay bare to the sky like a scar, its tower half-drowned in the lake. Just like the mountains, Daevabad was sick…

Oh, this kingdom was eight hundred years. There’s no kingdoms that lasted for eight hundred years. There’s this one stable ruling family? I think we should pull that apart a bit. - from the Fantasy Inn interview

Fiza, however--God bless her--had stopped finding anything about his transformation intimidating and treated him with her normal base level of rudeness. “Yes, your wateriness,” she said with a sarcastic bow.

No more journeying with attractive magical warriors on ridiculously dangerous quests after this. Nahri clearly had a problem.

Every person has within her a certain amount of self-preservation to guide her. But when the self in question has taken the sheer number of knocks

Every person has within her a certain amount of self-preservation to guide her. But when the self in question has taken the sheer number of knocks that I have, the preservation instinct is ground down. Mine is a fine dust, little particulates that have all but disappeared. I’m not sure what self there is left to preserve.

He warms up to “Amazing Grace,” and so do I. We’re singing together now and I’m in my head voice, a tone I haven’t heard out of my mouth since I was a kid in youth choir. Buck-toothed and scrappy but with a voice like a lounge singer just months away from a lung cancer diagnosis.
Those days are long gone. I’ve since found the blues to fill the space in my soul, but I remember what it was like to sing up high like that. Reaching for the cracked paint in the ceiling, then past it, too. A gospel, a prayer. Never a celebration.

To say the heavy snowfall caught the city by surprise is a ridiculous understatement. People are in a state of shock, interspersed by moments of panic. No one knows what to do with their hands. Should they try to dig out their vehicles, which they don’t know how to drive in these weather conditions, or do they dial their workplaces to say they aren’t coming in? Tips on how to drive in the snow fill local news reports while those who had moved here to get out of this kind of vengeful weather curse their misfortune and sneer at the masses who are seemingly struck helpless by flakes of fluffy white precipitation. I am on the side of the cursing and sneering few.

I drive away from the cabin with the knowledge that I’ve been reprimanded and nourished simultaneously. It’s a new experience for me. Does Bonnie experience this every day? Is this what it’s like to have a mother?

“I’ve never seen the point of tears. There’s something inside me that grows cold at the thought of shedding them, at the sight of someone else letting them fall. I don’t give into tears, not even now, because I’ll never take the chance that someone will see it as weakness, as I do. But I wonder what it would be like if I did. I feel like we’re on the brink of something in our friendship.”
“You run away,” she [Simone] continues. “Because you don’t want to stay and ask for love. You keep people at an arm’s length and blame them for not wanting to come closer when you’re the one that pushed them to the corners of your universe.”

“…not really there yet. If I bring her back, I want to be a little different. I want her journey to make sense. I want it to be a progression.” - from the Hank Garner interview

I’m a woman over twenty-five. I’m so used to people ignoring my existence that it’s startling when someone admits they’ve been paying attention.

Wissen ist macht

Is there anyone who is truly as they appear?

Wissen ist macht

Is there anyone who is truly as they appear?

I finally gather the courage to look directly at Walter. His wavy blond hair is half dry, half wet. He’s saying something to Karl, but then he turns and looks at me and his face breaks into a smile. His eyes are the warmest, kindest blue.

My original plan had been to write the book from the Jewish experience. But the more I learned, the more I wanted to understand the mindset of the Nazis. How could a people, a deeply civilized, democratic nation, become so unbelievably cruel; to de-humanise one another, and commit atrocities on such an unimaginable scale? The more I read, the more I realised that what I wanted to say could perhaps be more powerfully told if I were to climb inside the head of a Nazi. To tell the tale of someone young, who was fed a twisted ideology, taught hatred from day one. Someone who knew no other way. What could possibly change their outlook, when it went so against everything their family and the society around them believed? - from Why I Wrote This Book on Fein’s website

…there is no such thing as news per se. News is power, wrapped in a message, presented, told and retold. With this newspaper…I have the power to put into the world what I want, and in the way I would have the masses understand. Do you realize what supremacy, what authority that gives me?

I didn’t set out to write a love story per se, but in thinking about what would change someone’s thinking, when they had been so thoroughly and successfully groomed into the perfect Nazi, what could possibly change their mind? Realistically, the answer had to be love. - from the BusyWords interview

I always wanted to write something about my father’s background because I knew so little about it. He died when I was seventeen and I never really got a chance to speak with him about it. - from her People Like Us book launch video

I had the benefit of a large collection of family papers, including contemporaneous diaries, photos, letters, official documents etc, all of which are now lodged with the University of Sussex’s Centre of German-Jewish Studies. This was a rich resource of contemporaneous lives, told in the raw, with no benefit of hindsight, no retrospective view through the filter of history.- from the BusyWords interview

“What did they see, Mama?” I murmured to her. “What was it that came to meet the birds that flew into the west?”
…My mother turned her face to me ov

“What did they see, Mama?” I murmured to her. “What was it that came to meet the birds that flew into the west?”
…My mother turned her face to me over her shoulder. “What came,” she said, “was night, and all its names.”

…not all migrations end with a return home. Every memory begins to cut if you hold onto it too tight.

If Simorgh unveils its face to you, you will find
that all the birds, be they thirty or forty or more,
are but the shadows cast by that unveiling.
What shadow is ever separated from its maker?
Do you see?
The shadow and its maker are one and the same,
so get over surfaces and delve into mysteries. - from that poem

The first funeral I attended was held under a black froth of wings. The deceased was a crow that had been gashed in the belly by a red-tailed hawk…That was the day my body started conspiring against me. I’d gotten my period.

I am tied by blood to Syria, and the country where my father was born is suffering while the country in which I was born still views us as not fully American. Where, then, does that leave me? And for people of Syrian descent living in diaspora, particularly for the generation of children who will grow up in exile because their parents left Syria for safety reasons, what can we take with us? What do we carry with us that cannot be lost? - from the Goodreads interview

We parted. I wiped my face with the back of my hand.
“Tell me something beautiful,” you said.
I opened my mouth and out came the only thing that I had ever known to be as beautiful as it was true, that I had once met a woman who knew how to fly.
You clasped my chilled hand in yours and lowered your gaze to our fingers. I hoped I’d said the right thing. My mother always used to say that people in mourning prefer not to talk about the earth.
“What a wonderful thing,” you said, “for just one instant, to be so close to God.”