“He looked awful, as moist and pale as certain veined cheeses.”
-Sam Lipsyte, “Final Boy”
The Simile Museum
September 4, 2025
“And about his hands, the song would tell, stumpy and thick and calloused, one open like a flower expecting a bee, the other gripping the knife like tree roots swallowing a rock.”
-Irene Solà, “When I Sing, Mountains Dance”
August 8, 2025
“I doubt we talked about Italian Renaissance painting as we walked down the gravel path away from the library…but surely there was talk, miles of it in an instant, like a fast train that kept picking up speed, passing scene after blurry scene as we raced toward a destination we didn’t know, couldn’t know, on that first day, a day that contained all our days together and all the days after that, because your soul knows everything about a new love before you do.”
-Hilton Als, “Finding a Family of Boys”
July 15, 2025
“Overcoming the reticence at the heart of her shyness was like scaling a cliff only to discover another view of the real summit farther off.”
-Jim Shepard, “The Queen of Bad Influences”
July 4, 2025
“Bertie tried to keep the grin on his face, to show Gert excitement, but it was slipping between his fingers like sand.”
-Milo Todd, The Lilac People
March 17, 2025
“By the end of Tr*mp’s first month in office, universities had been squeezed like stress balls, into new and painful forms.”
-Nathan Heller, “Will Harvard Bend or Break?”
February 17, 2025
“There was nothing worse for a man than an awareness of his own obsolescence, the ticking of his heart marking time, like the second hand of a clock–mechanism of duty now more than desire, of memory more than moment.”
-Katherine Min, The Fetishist
January 13, 2025
“I’d stopped singing classical after leaving college and my deeper upbringing had reclaimed my voice like moss overgrowing the sides of an old house, slowly mulching it into consonance with nature.”
-Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations
December 7, 2024
“That night I told Harris about the telephotographer, the real estate card, and the death of our neighbor. I was glad to have something major to report on; he had to say something—a man had died.
‘That’s sad. He was a young guy.’ Each word said like a dollar he wished he was spending elsewhere.”
-Miranda July, All Fours
July 28, 2024
“Malone had one of those sweet, receptive natures that take impressions like hot wax.”
-Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance
The Simile Museum 