“In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce.”
First published in The Night in Question. Read online
Category: May-Lan Tan (as editor)
May-Lan Tan is the author of Things to Make and Break. @amanlyant
‘Recitatif’ by Toni Morrison
“We sat on the ground and breathed. Lady Esther. Apple blossoms. I still go soft when I smell one or the other”
First published in Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (Morrow, 1983). Read online
‘Boys’ by Rick Moody
“The boys are ugly, they are failures, they will never be loved, they enter the house.”
From Demonology. New York: Faber and Faber, 2000. Read online
‘My Daughter the Racist’ by Helen Oyeyemi
“The soldiers remind me of the boys from here sometimes. The way our boys used to be.”
From Mr Fox. London: Picador, 2011. Read online
‘Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’ by Nam Le
“We were two animals in the dark, hacking at one another, and never since have I felt that way—that sense of consecration.”
From The Boat (New York: Knopf, 2008.) Online at Zoetrope-All Story
‘Trouble and Troubledness’ by Juliet Escoria
“But sometimes you just want to make something on yourself that will never go away, something you shaped, something that will be there forever: a sign for someone else to find.”
from Black Cloud. New York: Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2014
‘The Library of Babel’ by Jorge Luis Borges
“There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god.”
From Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 1962. Read online
‘San’ by Lan Samantha Chang
“Things fall apart, it seems, with terrible slowness. I could not see that true mathematics, rather than keeping track of things, moves toward the unexplainable.”
From Hunger. New York: Penguin, 2000
‘The Toughest Indian in the World’ by Sherman Alexie
“He wanted to change their minds about salmon, he wanted to break open their hearts and see the future in their blood, because he loved them.”
From The Toughest Indian in the World. New York: Grove, 2001. Read online.
‘El Paso’ by Jayne Anne Phillips
“She had the look of someone didn’t sweat much, just burned a coal inside.”
From Black Tickets. New York: Delacorte, 1979. Read online
A Personal Anthology 