16 Tuesday Jul 2019
Posted in Sunday Sentence
My weekly contribution to David Abrams’ “Sunday Sentence” project in which participants share the best sentence read during the past week “out of context and without commentary.”
SOURCE: Paper Son (Pegasus, 2019), a novel by S.J. Rozan
09 Sunday Jul 2017
Posted in C.A. Explains It All, Sunday Sentence
Tags
#readwomen, Ashley Shelby, David Abrams, Picador, South Pole Station, Sunday Sentence, women novelists
My weekly contribution to David Abrams’ “Sunday Sentence” project in which participants share the best sentence read during the past week “out of context and without commentary.”
SOURCE: South Pole Station (Picador, 2017), a novel by Ashley Shelby
11 Sunday Dec 2016
Posted in Sunday Sentence
My weekly contribution to David Abrams’ “Sunday Sentence” project in which participants share the best sentence read during the past week “out of context and without commentary.”
The rain sounds like music from a distant planet.
SOURCE: Alice Hoffman‘s novel Here on Earth
19 Sunday Jun 2016
Posted in Sunday Sentence
My weekly contribution to David Abrams’ “Sunday Sentence” project in which participants share the best sentence read during the past week “out of context and without commentary.”
There had been a sign to detour in the center of the main street of this town, but cars had obviously gone through, so, believing it was some repair which had been completed, Nicholas Adams drove on through the town along the empty, brick-paved street, stopped by traffic lights that flashed on and off on this traffic-less Sunday, and would be gone next year when the payments on the system were not met; on under the heavy trees of the small town that are a part of your heart if it is your town and you have walked under them, but that are only too heavy, that shut out the sun and that dampen the houses for a stranger; out past the last house and onto the highway that rose and fell straight away ahead with banks of red dirt sliced clearly away and the second-growth timber on both sides.
SOURCE: Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Fathers and Sons” from The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition
12 Sunday Jun 2016
Posted in Sunday Sentence
My weekly contribution to David Abrams’ “Sunday Sentence” project in which participants share the best sentence read during the past week “out of context and without commentary.”
She told me she had a wild-animal sort of babyhood.
SOURCE: Kaye Gibbons‘ novel Charms for the Easy Life
05 Sunday Jun 2016
Posted in Sunday Sentence
My weekly contribution to David Abrams’ “Sunday Sentence” project in which participants share the best sentence read during the past week “out of context and without commentary.”
It is the inherent right of all writers to experiment with the possibilities of language in every way they can imagine—without the adventurous spirit, nothing new can ever be born.
SOURCE: Haruki Murakami‘s dual novellas Wind/Pinball (introduction)
09 Sunday Aug 2015
Posted in Sunday Sentence
Tags
Aidan Turner, Cornwall, David Abrams, Eleanor Tomlinson, historical fiction, Poldark novels, Sunday Sentence, Winston Graham
My weekly contribution to David Abrams’ “Sunday Sentence” project in which participants share the best sentence read during the past week “out of context and without commentary.”
Falmouth smiled, a very contained smile, carefully poured out, like a half measure of some valuable liquid and not to be wasted.
SOURCE: Winston Graham‘s novel The Four Swans (the sixth Poldark book)
31 Sunday May 2015
Posted in Sunday Sentence
For weeks now, I have participated in David Abram’s #SundaySentence challenge. This week, instead of sharing just one sentence without commentary as per his rules, I’ll be sharing a handful of great ones from Vietnamese author & activist Duong Thu Huong‘s Novel without a Name.
I was recently introduced to this moving account of the Vietnam war by Caroline of the Beauty is a Sleeping Cat blog as part of this year’s Literature & War Readalong. Over on Caroline’s blog, I said how blown away I was by Huong’s rich prose, and called it a perfect storm of a book because of the way that the descriptive elements, dialogue and characterization came together so beautifully.
A perfect example of characterization in this passage, which describes a liaison agent that is guiding main character Quan into another sector of the Communist-occupied area:
He had a pug nose and puffy red eyes, the kind of face they say brings bad luck. There was something sinister about him. But then he was just a faithful liaison agent, by all appearances a gentle, decent man. God bless him. After all, he had survived 317 bombardments.
Then there is this passage, which details an improbable find that Quan makes in a decaying, bombed-out shelter after the liaison agent leaves him on his own:
I hacked away colocassias along a rock wall. A house appeared, or more like a room without a roof, sealed off by four rock walls, meticulously layered like a box without a lid, bottomless. In the middle, in a hammock strung between two trees, lay a human skeleton. It looked as if it was sleeping there. The bones, intact, shone an immaculate white…The dead man’s face was frozen in a toothy grin; his teeth were shiny, straight. They were the teeth of a young man. Like me, he must have wandered for days and days in this surreal valley shrouded in fog, choked with vegetation….
The fog rolled across the ground, seeped into my armpits, crawled up my neck. I heard, as if in a dream, the strain of a flute….
The immaculate skeleton looked at me, laughing, as if to say, ‘So I’m still whole. Magnificent, isn’t it, companion?’ The nylon hammock [too] was still in perfect shape. Our civilization of plastics has worked miracles for this century.
That knock-out line, “spoken’ by the skeleton, just hangs there in all that lush vegetation haunting me well into the next scenes. Soon after this encounter, in another shelter, a now bedridden Quan examines his surroundings:
My head resting on my palms, I examined the bunker’s roof beams. On the main beam, in a furrow, I spotted a nest of fleas. Sated, they slept soundly. The war was a paradise for them. They lived well, always satisfied. We offered them unlimited blood. This was a meagre tax compared to the tributes the bombs claimed from us.
Everything about that paragraph is just…pulsing…like those falling bombs. More later on my thoughts on the book and its author.
10 Sunday May 2015
Posted in Sunday Sentence
My weekly contribution to David Abrams’ “Sunday Sentence” project in which participants share the best sentence read during the past week “out of context and without commentary.”
I’m often mistaken for an unhappier woman – though
in the Metropolitan’s Dutch wing, I crack a smile
at Maes’ painting of a young mother quietly sewing
lace.
SOURCE: Opening line from Nicole Rollender‘s poem “The Lacemaker” from Nashville Review Spring 2015 issue
03 Sunday May 2015
Posted in Sunday Sentence
Tags
Chimney Fire, Claudia Emerson, David Abrams, late wife, LSU Press, Southern Messenger series, southern poets, Sunday Sentence, women poets
My weekly contribution to David Abrams’ “Sunday Sentence” project in which participants share the best sentence read during the past week “out of context and without commentary.”
I learned to dread winter early,
before fall showed any real sign
of itself, the world still filled
with locusts, crickets, bees in the boneset,
ashen moths quickening the dusk.
SOURCE: Lines from Claudia Emerson‘s poem “Chimney Fire” in Pulitzer Prize-Winning Collection Late Wife (LSU Press, Southern Messenger Series)
