Magnificent Octopus

Skagra adjusted the controls again. "When I was born, this is what Drornid had become," he said gravely. Romana turned her eyes ...

But Özgür never hangs up on Elaine because Elaine never lies like that. If she lies at all. Özgür's never caught her. Sometimes he wonde...

When, in our second year, we discussed the function of defence mechanisms and found that we were humbled by the power of that portion of our...

Book acquired: The Unnamed , by Joshua Ferris. "There is no laboratory examination to confirm the presence or absence of the condition...

Did you ever notice that women can seem common while men never do? You won't ever hear anyone describe a man's appearance as common....

Book acquired: Shada (Doctor Who: The Lost Adventure by Douglas Adams) , by Gareth Roberts. It starts this way: At the age of five, Skagr...

The years I spent getting high and reading library books I do not regret. It wasn't a bad life, even if I would probably never go back. ...

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...