Magnificent Octopus

World was in the face of the beloved—, but suddenly was all poured out. World is outside. World cannot be grasped. Why, when I raised to...

"The pistol shrimp digs out a little hole to live in. But every once in a while, something else comes and sets up camp in the shrimp...

What a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe! Every atom, impressed with good and with ill, retains at once the motion which phil...

Rilke to Tsvetayeva, May 10, 1926: You, poet, do you sense how you have overwhelmed me, you and your magnificent fellow reader; I'm wri...

[Actual lines from various profiles across several dating apps. A found poem of sorts.] Dear future girlfriend, Fantastically flawed hum...

When he got home he found in the mailbox a postcard from Claire that had been sent from Bonifacio the preceding week. The news was out of da...

Navoi lived for four years in Samarkand: a city so deeply imbued with poetry that even the doctors wrote their medical treatises in verse. B...

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...