Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review‘s site. Often, we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We often share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some of the curious, striking, strange, and wonderful bits we found, from books that are coming out this month.
—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor
From Hélène Cixous’s Rêvoir (Seagull Books), translated from the French by Beverley Bie Brahic:
I lie, I say I’m going to the hairdresser, secretly I’m off to see you, I am on my way right to the day when the Question peeps up, I no longer know which day that was. Dispatched on the instructions of Time, of Age, like a sprite ready to demand the Shadow’s identity card, proof of domicile, like the spirits of dates delegated to persecutions, of retirement dates, of warrants of life, of entry into silences, of fateful anniversaries
Day broke, the tale was back on the road, I followed it
From The Silver Snarling Trumpet, a memoir by Robert Hunter, the primary lyricist of the Grateful Dead, written in the sixties. The manuscript was long thought to be lost, but his wife recently rediscovered it in a storage unit. It will be published in full by Hachette:
It was the people who made the “scene” revolve; wonderful, inexhaustible people we thought … until we began to question things that perhaps we ought not to have questioned, things such as, “Can we live this way forever?” Perhaps we could have if we hadn’t asked, but by the very act of becoming conscious that a question existed, an answer became imperative. Part of the answer seemed to lie in the realm of whatever it was that society demanded of us … and what it demanded was our lives. Given impetus by this snatch of what seemed to be an answer, we began to ask the question of one another, and from there, it was only a small step to becoming frightened. And that, of course, was the end of being carefree, for we had begun, if only by the act of questioning, to care.
Others came along, others who would have belonged with us before, except that we began to question them too. Not seeing fit to acknowledge that such a question existed, they took over our philosophy and our guitars, our beards and cigarette butts, and left us with the world.
I remember coffeehouses and empty pockets, the unplanned, unending parties … the bad wine, the music that is inseparable from the impoverished decadence, and wonder sometimes if it was a fair trade.
From Elsa Richardson’s Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut (Pegasus Books):
To quieten his patient’s obstreperous belly, Darwin devised a specially tailored course of treatment: she was to swallow ‘ten corns of black pepper’ after dinner, take a daily dose of crude mercury and allow a ‘small pipe’ to be occasionally inserted into her rectum to ‘facilitate the escape of air’. This dispiriting prescription would seem to imply that they were dealing with a purely physical problem, but in his notes Darwin pointed to another possibility: an excessively noisy gut, especially in a young woman, was often a symptom of ‘fear’.
From Jean Giono’s Fragments of a Paradise (Archipelago), translated from the French by Paul Eprile:
On L’Indien the captain started to curse. Calmly. At his pipe. At his lighter. At a button on his tunic. Just for the fun of it. The officers were cursing, but not in anger, and the crew began to indulge in the sheer pleasure of cursing. One evening when the moon was out, Hourdeau, on the night watch, went looking for the cabin boy, who’d gone to sleep on a stack of tarpaulins. He wondered where that little fool had gotten to. Then Hourdeau went below, took off his boots, and started to curse, calmly. First at the candle. Then at a flask of rum in the pocket of his peacoat. He went back up on deck, not worried, simply wanting to find the cabin boy. He called to him to windward. As it left his mouth, the boy’s name had no substance. It was immediately torn away. But what had real substance, and hit just the right note, was an old swear word he recalled, which he started to repeat with glee.
From Paper of Wreckage: An Oral History of the New York Post, 1976-2024 (Atria). “Wood” here refers to the front page of the New York Post:
David Rosenthal: Murdoch was very harsh with all the editors. He went around to every editor, whatever your purview was, and made you recite what your lineup was for the next day. He really wanted to get down into the weeds. I mean, what was your tenth or eleventh story that you had for the next day? I have a very firm recollection, because it shook me up, of going through the whole lineup, which was fairly standard, it was not a busy day. I came down to the bottom of the list, I said, “Oh, yeah, we have the shooting of a bodega owner in Brooklyn. It turns out, it looked like a drug deal gone bad with the owner of the store or some shit like that.” I just then went on to the next thing. He said, “Wait a minute, go back for a moment. Tell me more about the bodega murder.” I told him what little I knew. He said, “This is what we want to do. We want to get a reporter and photographer out to the wake tonight. And we want to hire a priest to say some prayers, ‘Brooklyn mourns’ that kind of thing. And we want to make a picture of that.” You could have heard a pin drop in the room. I actually said, “We don’t really do that.” He said, “Oh, yes, you do.” I said, “I don’t remember ever doing that”—because I’m a fool, you know, I know nothing. He says, “You’re going to do it. Otherwise,” he said, “when I’m stuck for a wood at 4:30 in the morning, I’m going to call you at home and ask, ‘What do you suggest?’ Do you understand?”… I went out of the meeting very shook … I forgot which photographer it might have been. I said, “You’ve got to get out to Brooklyn. I’m sorry. This is like a bullshit story. But it’s now a big bullshit story.” Aida [Alvarez] got me some copy, from what I remember. What would have been two graphs turned into books or something like that. I don’t think we ever did get the priest. Then we worked the cops on it. It was nothing. It wasn’t even a sympathy story because it was a drug deal that went bad, as I recall. It wasn’t the typical crying heart story. It was a fuckup story. I don’t think they played it as wood but they played it big the next day.
From Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):
I have measured out my life with the sea urchins that have pierced my feet with their spines. I have now lost my fear of sea urchins. I don’t know why. There are other fears I would prefer to lose, after all. I know they have to survive in the wilderness of the ocean; their cousins are the sea star and they can grow for centuries. There are sea urchins that are almost immortal, older than the mortal mothers and their mortal children fleeing from wars on boats that sometimes sink. Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely. If we were to measure the love of mothers for their children with coffee spoons, there would never be enough spoons for that kind of love.
