“He looked awful, as moist and pale as certain veined cheeses.”
-Sam Lipsyte, “Final Boy”
The Simile Museum
Tag: Fiction
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
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
February 10, 2024
“I had seen how he could shuck truths from men like oyster shells, how he could pry into a breast with a glance and a well-timed word. So little of the world did not yield to his sounding. In the end, I think the fact that I did not was his favorite thing about me.”
-Madeline Miller, Circe
January 27, 2024
“He closed his eyes. His head felt refreshed from the freezer still, his thoughts moving in an orderly fashion, like children in a snaking line, holding hands and following their teacher out of a building where some dangerous event was commencing. Like little children, his thoughts, innocent, trusting, and afraid. But who was this teacher? She was new to him. He was a transfer. This was his first day.”
-Joy Williams, “The Beach House”
December 31, 2023
“We ate with our elbows and didn’t speak. We let our knives narrate. My mother caught crickets in the backyard and panfried them with sesame oil. Bent over the table, my father packed his stomach like a suitcase, folding pieces of pork in half before sealing them into his mouth.”
-K-Ming Chang
December 21, 2023
“Ari did most of his work from home and liked to move his office around at the press of a button, so that the staircase that ran through the center of the building was the only fixed unit, and all the other rooms slid up and down like beads on an abacus.”
-Helen Oyeyemi
The Simile Museum 