Aloneliness is the mirror image of loneliness, and it's the feeling that my partner and I are trying to stave off when we pretend the other doesn't exist for a few hours a day. If loneliness comes about when there's a discrepancy between the amount of quality time you want to spend with other people and how much you actually get, being aloney is a mismatch between the amount of quality time you would like to spend all by yourself, and how much you’re actually able to do so.
I discovered one of my favourite delights as a result of an exciting love affair, which for complicated reasons (and I am aware of how dodgy this sounds) included a lot of one-night hotel stays.
My affection for the soul-resetting balm of a single-night hotel stay has long outlasted that relationship. To be clear, I am talking about expensive hotels – ones that would be unaffordable for more than a night. I have stayed in most of London’s ultra-luxurious hotels this way; sampling them as if I’m at a wine tasting.
In other collections, I often find that in bringing different forms together, an author sacrifices the cohesion of their book. In Festival Days on the other hand, the disparateness of the pieces highlights the consistency of Beard’s style. Beard renders the boring and the everyday in the same vivid language as the violent and the truly awful. In the end, Beard’s writing bounds over literary questions of fiction versus nonfiction. Her essays instead resemble forms plucked from life itself: eulogies, stories told around a fire, narratives of our own lives that echo in our heads.
Yejidé’s characters are so finely drawn, her language so lush, the city’s landmarks so cleverly repurposed within this magical setting, that the fictional place feels as real as the place itself.
Yejidé is a D.C. native who won critical acclaim for her first novel, “Time of the Locust.” “Creatures,” her second, more than fulfills the promise of her first.
Written with great energy and generosity, Bright Burning Things is the raw and emotional story of a woman’s search for self-knowledge; one that grips from the beginning.
The joy of “Horizontal Vertigo” is that it offers a unique entry into Mexico City’s “inexhaustible encyclopedia” of people, places and old traditions, complementing the history books and outperforming the tour guides. Those expecting more personal stories about Villoro himself will have to find them wandering among the patriotic landmarks and the pirated music for sale on the busy sidewalks: Villoro is so closely identified with Mexico City that it’s impossible to imagine how one can be known without the other, which is why his writings consistently employ the communal “we,” as in this telling statement about the unbreakable bond between Chilangopolis and chilangos: “What was once a cityscape is now our autobiography.”
We’re going to see the angels
my father says but in Spanish