“They all sat there in silence. It was like being in a play where no one knew the next line.”
– Emily St. John Mandel
The Simile Museum
February 3, 2021
“When I write, it’s as if I were butchering eels… I pay little attention to the unpleasantness of the operation.”
-Elena Ferrante
January 30, 2021
“Then the river, like an awakened bear, yanked the rope and Juan went down too.”
-Diane Cook
January 22, 2021
“Most of Muriel’s friends are writers, real writers, not like my old friends who got over it like the flu.”
-Lily King
January 19, 2021
“At the same time, the natural autonomy of horizontalism, and its deep reliance on independent, small affinity groups of activists, encourages a constant drive to innovate. This self-overcoming is the engine of our velocity. It grants us the power to wobble, to swerve like a flock of birds and act in ways that confound our enemy, as events spiral toward the people’s vision.”
-Micah White
December 25, 2020
“The sun is wide, like an eye cut open,
and it blasts the man
so that his whole shadow
scuttles beneath his belly.”
-Max Ritvo
December 19, 2020
“When he visited, Desiree felt like a girl again, the years falling away like meat off the bone.”
-Brit Bennett
December 12, 2020
“She sorts through the other babies. She pats me down as if searching for something. She touches me on the thigh. She feels like she’s about to snow.”
-Sabrina Orah Mark
November 22, 2020
“Tarquin Gould’s parents were out of town, so he had to throw a party, those were the rules. The news circulated like a virus: it was uncertain who had started it, but by the time the weekend came around it had been received by everyone who needed to receive it.”
-Emma Sloley
November 18, 2020
“It was hard to tell the nature of the look from across the expanse of equipment, under the gym’s flattening fluorescent light. Either way, she had her pale eyes fixed on him, and every once in a while, in the middle of a set, she gave him an effortful smile. The amount of weight she was lifting, he saw, was significant. An immense iron stack rose up slowly behind her like an omen.”
-Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
