Magnificent Octopus

Love Song How shall I keep my soul from touching yours? How shall I lift it up beyond you to other things? Ah, I would gladly hide it ...

While it's true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears t...

Is it because of some billowing whiteness within us, unsullied, inviolate, that our encounters with objects so pristine never fail to leave ...

— from The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them , by Elif Batuman. This explains much.

Incandescent bulb Her desk had been swept bare. There is only the incandescent bulb above it, giving off light and heat. All is still. T...

The Three-Body Problem , by Cixin Liu, takes its name from the problem of physics to do with gravitational systems and the predictability of...

Ruta once heard the life of the mushroom spawn. It was an underground rustling that sounded like a dull sigh, and then she could hear the ge...

People think they live more intensely than animals, than plants, and especially than things. Animals sense that they live more intensely tha...

Standing under the flashing dome of the night sky, Wang suddenly felt the universe shrink until it was so small that only he was imprisoned ...

"At any minute, we could find ourselves in a nontemporal state without ever having realized it. If the ego and consciousness were relat...

World on a String © Markus Reugels I'm reading Olga Tokarczuk's Primeval and Other Times slowly, contemplatively. It's a str...

I paused, looking out at the blue merging of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and I wondered if there was a word for it, a name, a title,...

Did you know Iceland was occupied during World War II? It seems the British occupied Iceland pre-emptively, so Germany couldn't. Brit...

The Particles of Existence exhibition at Phi Centre wants you to discover the universe at a non-human scale. Chalkroom is the star of the s...

There are two kinds of learning, from the inside and from the outside. The fist is regarded as the best, or even the only kind. And so peopl...

I sleep to my heart's content, day and night. Between naps, I read. A huge fatigue turns up between books, between naps. A black hole to...

The sight must've been high tragedy, that's what I thought. A fucking junky, dying on his ass, starving, face like a corpse, apologi...

After feeling a little lovelorn the past few days, I resolved it was nothing some expensive shoes couldn't rectify, so yesterday, having...

For people who've never shot up or snorted or smoked heroin, it can be hard to understand the allure. Catch sight of a man or woman whos...

I had always found it unpleasant to have guests in my apartment. They filled up my rooms with strange sentences I would never have formulate...