Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.
—Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor
An excerpt from Maïa Hruska’s Kafkaesque: From Jorge Luis Borges to Primo Levi, Ten Writers Who Translated Kafka and Transformed Twentieth-Century Literature (Ecco), translated from the French by Sam Taylor:
Let us consider, for example, Kafka’s elegant diary entry on 2 August 1914: ‘Germany has declared war on Russia—Swimming in the afternoon.’
From Xiao Hai’s memoir Adrift in the South (Granta Editions), translated from the Chinese by Tony Hao:
A few years ago, I wrote a poem titled ‘Production Floor #2’, which was inspired by my time in Sino-Nokia. The first stanza of the poem reads:
The assembly lines are its arms
The computer screens are its eyes
My brain its engine, running day and night Light bulbs the sun, beneath which we dream in exhaustion
Oh, my production floor
This place is not my home
My home is three thousand li awayAnd so it was, in the dazzling metropolis of Shenzhen, that I experienced many firsts in my life: my first time getting trapped on an illegal bus; my first time cutting open a finger with a blade on an overnight shift; my first time washing under a tap after an evening shift in winter; my first time waking up from a wet dream in pain, not knowing what at happened; my first time picking wild lychees and mangoes in the woods by the factory campus with coworkers … My life was unfathomably enriched in the big city. My teenage years were like those wild lychees, growing larger and redder as the weather got warmer. I was oblivious to the time silently slipping away from me.
From Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors (MCD):
I talked to him in outlines, general terms. He responded in kind. Despite the hours we spent together, we never exchanged anything of any real worth. Our words were like signals relayed by beacon across the surface of a plain that stretched out in all directions, and what they contained was a sign of speech, a statement that communication had been achieved, but that was all—the real message was hidden. And on a plain like this there was no risk of encountering any kind of danger; the sheer volume of land that separated each of us from the other foreclosed the possibility of real contact. Our conversations drained me anyway.
A passage from Dylan Gottlieb’s Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York (Harvard University Press) describes how, in the late seventies and eighties, a “yuppie-driven real estate boom triggered waves of harassment and arson for profit”:
It never began with arson. Before resorting to fire, speculators employed legal tactics to evict tenants. If that failed, they turned to a strategy of steadily escalating harassment. … One man, seventy-one years old with mobility issues, said he was ordered to leave in the middle of the night. Once he had done so, the door was nailed shut behind him. More experienced speculators employed professional “relocation companies” or recruited squads of toughs to do the eviction work. Teddy Krain and Alan Sackman, infamous “building emptiers” who had received some $12 million in city redevelopment tax subsidies, hired men to eject tenants from a series of SROs they owned. At the Hamilton Hotel on Ninety-Ninth Street, tenants were beaten with baseball bats as they stumbled down the stairs. With the building emptied, Sackman and Krain turned the 189-unit, rent-stabilized and controlled building into thirty-three luxury co-op apartments. At the Arvia Hotel, one of their agents broke a tenant’s ribs with the butt of a rifle. Another resident was shot with a .357 Magnum. After drinking heavily, the owners’ goons marauded through the building, banging on doors and firing guns into the air until police arrived …
Landlords had demonstrated they were willing to employ deadly force against their tenants. As demand for upscale housing surged, some escalated to arson. The first fatal fire would strike Hoboken on January 20, 1979. Twenty-one people were killed and 130 survivors were permanently displaced from their homes at 131 Clinton Street. … In the coming months, at least two other multi-alarm fires struck Hoboken apartment buildings, directly displacing or simply terrorizing dozens of tenants into vacating. In total, twenty-six people died in arson-related fires in Hoboken in 1979. Two more—boys aged eight and two—would die there in 1980.