ProsePorn

No One Left to Care About the Fat Man by Rusty Barnes "The sky is poison, winter blue. I can see my breath. Jackie is at the end of the road, and the music from the radio—classic rock, of course, where the 70s and 80s never end, like an IHOP for chrissakes—is going to take me wherever she is on one long brutish chord. I want somewhere quiet, where we can sit on someone's porch and drink bitter ic…

Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente ON THE CORNER OF 16TH STREET AND HIERATICA a factory sings and sighs. Look: its thin spires flash green, and spit long loops of white flame into the night. Casimira owns this place, as did her father and her grandmother and probably her most distant progenitor. It is pleasant to imagine them, curling and uncurling their proboscis-fingers against machines of sti…

Eros the Bittersweet - Anne Carson The English word ‘symbol’ is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. A metaphor is a species of symbol. So is a lover. In the words of Aristophanes (in Plato’s Symposium): Each one of us is but the symbolon o…

Thomas Wolfe Biography Thomas Wolfe Biography by Elizabeth Nowell Chapter XIV SYNOPSIS Critique-(comprehension analysis) This chapter tells us about the Thomas Wolfe’s dysfunction. Thomas Wolfe is at the mercy of a tight budget. It’s been four years and his publisher and editor, Scribner & Son and Maxwell Perkins, are patient with their author, waiting for his second novel. Thomas tries everythin…

"Crossing Over: The Vietnam Stories" by Richard Currey "I think there will be constant sun. A long and awesome heat. Fields of tropical light. Instead there is rain, days of it. Skies misted closed and we dig. Trenches, foxholes, sandbag, emplacements, latrines. I'm told more than once You don't have to do this, you know. You got some status around here. Doc don't need to do no manual labor, you…

He is all I’ll love. /r/offmychest/comments/1ubpi0w/he_is_all_ill_love/ https://redd.it/1ubpin0 @r_proseporn

The Recognitions - Gaddis —Al-Shira-al-jamânija . . . , he whispered. —What? What is it you're saying? Aunt May demanded, rounding a corner. —Al-Shira-al-jamânija . . . the bright star of Yemen . . . —Where do you hear things like that? she scolded. —Yemen indeed! And she turned him toward the stairs, and sent him up to read in Foxe's Book of Martyrs , one of the books provided to prepare him for…

Hild by Nicola Griffith THE CHILD’S WORLD CHANGED late one afternoon, though she didn’t know it. She lay at the edge of the hazel coppice, one cheek pressed to the moss that smelt of worm cast and the last of the sun, listening: to the wind in the elms, rushing away from the day, to the jackdaws changing their calls from “Outward! Outward!” to “Home now! Home!,” to the rustle of the last frighten…

scale & filth along with the Devil, along with the angels, & all snared within the earth & us, all embodied in a single pulse of a heart mine, yours, ours & all my subject as I take aim & make of the fish flesh incarnate. The criticasters will say l am this small thing & my pictures that irrelevant thing. They will beat a bedlam outside & inside my poor head & then I cannot keep time with the dru…

Gould's Book of Fish- Richard Flanagan How Could I then—as I was painting my first fish-have known I was setting out on a venture as quixotic as it was infinite? I have read the lives of the artists &, like the lives of the saints, great-seems imprinted upon them from the beginning. At birth their fingers are recorded making painterly flourishes, merely waiting for a loaded brush & a canvas to fi…

Salammbô - Gustave Flaubert The Greeks ranged their skin tents in parallel lines; the Iberians set up their canvas marquees; the Gauls made shelters out of planks; the Libyans dry-stone huts, and the Negroes dug trenches in the sand with their nails to sleep in. Many, not knowing where to go, wandered around amid the baggage, and at nightfall lay on the ground in their tattered cloaks. The plain…

my heart is a hand reaching Thea, there is no line in your palm I have not traced, no knuckle cracked unheard, and the blue of your eyes is the coffin-lining of the world. I would they sing psalms to you and the down upon your thighs, and the eyelashes that have fallen to the fields you have worked. I would they lay boughs upon knees bent to the soil-hum of any place you have rested upon. Thea, i…