literary-fiction

One way to think about your life is as an extended free fall. An epiphany may help you see better as you fall. Rather than a meaningless blur, you will see rocks and trees and lizards. An epiphany is not a parachute.

You already know what the machine will write on your arm. That lie you__e been telling yourself__ou know what it is. That blind spot is not really a blind spot__ou__e choosing to look away. Perhaps more to the point, you already know whether you want to see it. You already know whether you__e going to use the machine. So why are you still reading this?

The blind faith in some half-assed conspiracy theories lines up with the logic of having to believe in something with no questions asked. It gives us peace and comfort. As simple as I was, I found that resorting to this absolute nonsense was the root of all our problems. It was a road of willingly-learned helplessness, for no action could make a difference, thereby no action was needed.

You are there and to their ears, being a Syrian sounds like you__e unclean, shameful, indecent; it__ like you owe the world an apology for your very existence.

THE NEXT DAY WAS RAIN-SOAKED and smelled of thick sweet caramel, warm coconut and ginger. A nearby bakery fanned its daily offerings. A lapis lazuli sky was blanketed by gunmetal gray clouds as it wept crocodile tears across the parched Los Angeles landscape.When Ivy was a child and she overheard adults talking about their break-ups, in her young feeble-formed mind, she imagined it in the most literal of essences. She once heard her mother speaking of her break up with an emotionally unavailable man.She said they broke up on 69th Street. Ivy visualized her mother and that man breaking into countless fragments, like a spilled box of jigsaw pieces. And she imagined them shattered in broken shards, being blown down the pavement of 69th Street.For some reason, on the drive home from Marcel__ apartment that next morning, all Ivy could think about was her mother and that faceless man in broken pieces, perhaps some aspects of them still stuck in cracks and crevices of the sidewalk, mistaken as grit.She couldn__ get the image of Marcel having his seizure out of her mind. It left a burning sensation in the center of her chest. An incessant flame torched her lungs, chest, and even the back door of her tongue. Witnessing someone you cared about experiencing a seizure was one of those things that scribed itself indelibly on the canvas of your mind. It was gut-wrenching. Graphic and out-of-body, it was the stuff that post traumatic stress syndrome was made of.

After all, she knows how painful it can be not to follow your heart and she knows about the obstacles and about loyalty and duty and about the countless kinds of love. If only Eve and Myles were freer to make the right choices, she thinks.

Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there.

With more time spent in their mother's presence, Maggie kept topics of conversation to small stuff, seldom ever wanted to dig below the surface, learned from her mother: just be polite, which makes Callie's own facile mental questioning and creative drive, paired with her physical rigidity, all the more oppositional, and, how they dance around serious subjects, laughable.

The problem with a lot of people who read only literary fiction is that they assume fantasy is just books about orcs and goblins and dragons and wizards and bullshit. And to be fair, a lot of fantasy is about that stuff.The problem with people in fantasy is they believe that literary fiction is just stories about a guy drinking tea and staring out the window at the rain while he thinks about his mother. And the truth is a lot of literary fiction is just that. Like, kind of pointless, angsty, emo, masturbatory bullshit.However, we should not be judged by our lowest common denominators. And also you should not fall prey to the fallacious thinking that literary fiction is literary and all other genres are genre. Literary fiction is a genre, and I will fight to the death anyone who denies this very self-evident truth.So, is there a lot of fantasy that is raw shit out there? Absolutely, absolutely, it__ popcorn reading at best. But you can__ deny that a lot of lit fic is also shit. 85% of everything in the world is shit. We judge by the best. And there is some truly excellent fantasy out there. For example, Midsummer Night__ Dream; Hamlet with the ghost; Macbeth, ghosts and witches; I__ also fond of the Odyessey; Most of the Pentateuch in the Old Testament, Gargantua and Pantagruel.Honestly, fantasy existed before lit fic, and if you deny those roots you__e pruning yourself so closely that you can__ help but wither and die.

From the moment any of us utter our first goo-goo's and ga-ga's, we are as good as gone. At that precise instant, any possibility that It will ever arise in us is irrevocably crushed. If any proof is needed, consider how immune to strong emotion our society has grown. At your next visit to the local funeral parlor, glance at the mourners, who can more properly be defined as spectators. Notice how they smell, how well-dressed and dignified they are. This is because viewing the dead has become overwhelmingly acceptable as a social function. Yes, even the corpse is part of the festivities, lying there as the guest of honor, laid out in his best clothes, pumped full of chemicals and smeared with make-up as the patrons file by and nurse their long buried consciences with silk handkerchiefs.

All that is gold does not glitter.Not all those who wander are lost:The old that is strong does not wither.Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

Write for joy. It is the *only* reason to write. Whatever happens to your books afterward, just write for joy. Send your current one out when it's done and forget it, start another, and keep on writing for joy. Words I now live by. Welwyn Wilton Katz

As the flesh gets in the way of our ideals, we regulate ourselves unto enslavement and inhumanity.The human spirit then dies and the animal in us returns.

She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor.The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signboards which lured one to purchase "confidence," or "sexual appeal," or whatever it was that was being advertised--the fluorescent lights in each store, contrasting with the shiny, black-tiled walls and eye-catching speckled marble tiles on the ground.One could lick the floor--the tiles were spotless, clean like the fake air she was breathing in, like the atoms and cells in her that were decaying in stale neglect.

After everything is said and done, a memory remains a treacherous thing_How long does one cling on to the people they__e lost? How long could I have remembered my grandfather? How long had it been since I forgotten him and my mind began harbouring other things?

School children, who have enjoyed reading a romance or a detective thriller or a novel about terror and conquest, make the invariable mistake of studying literature in the college. They make the mistake of learning theory in place of art; they acquire impediments in their own enjoyment of the books by allowing a set of theories to govern their own reading.

Kiana loved birds," Breena told him late one dusky evening. "When she was just a few summers old, she would run beneath them as they flew, her chubby arms stretched out as if tmo take flight alongside them." She sniffed and wrapped her arms around her stomach. "A few weeks before the attack, she told me that she was still going to fly one day. 'I look at the birds, and I see freedom,' she said. 'To soar above the hurt of the world, to be too high for the wars of men to touch you: that is what it means to fly.

All I want is to sleep--to dream. Life is better in dreams.