Trailer Park Tuesday: White Fur by Jardine Libaire

The trailer for Jardine Libaire’s new novel White Fur oozes 1980s New York City grit and glitz to such a degree, I picture Bret Easton Ellis standing off-camera with a mirrored tray in his hands, ready with two snowy lines of cocaine. Though the novel is less Less Than Zero than it is Romeo and Juliet, White Fur looks like it’s fueled with an endless supply of pharmaceuticals and sex that will drive readers forward through the pages. As the publisher’s plot summary tells it, the novel focuses on two star-crossed lovers: “Elise who grew up in a housing project without a father and didn’t graduate from high school; and Jamey, a junior at Yale, heir to a private investment bank fortune and beholden to high family expectations ....White Fur follows these indelible characters on their wild race through Newport mansions and downtown NYC nightspots, SoHo bars and WASP-establishment yacht clubs, through bedrooms and hospital rooms, as they explore, love, play, and suffer.” With an energetic pace and flickering jump cuts, the trailer certainly gives us a good feel for the 1980s urban life, both high- and low-. As Kirkus Reviews notes, we get that in the book as well: “The real strength of the novel is its Technicolor atmosphere: Libaire’s New York is a glittering whirlwind, raw and sweaty and intoxicating. A page-turning whirlwind steeped in pain and hope.”

Trailer Park Tuesday is a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

My First Time: Renee Rutledge

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is Renee Rutledge, author The Hour of Daydreams, published earlier this year by Forest Avenue Press. The Hour of Daydreams has been dubbed “essential reading” by Literary Mama, “one of 24 books to get excited for in 2017” by The Oregonian and “a lyrical, intriguing debut” by Oakland Magazine. Renee’s work has also been published in ColorLines, Mutha Magazine, Ford City Anthology, Literary Hub, Red Earth Review, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and others. Renee is currently working on short stories inspired by family history and conducting research for her second novel. Learn more about her work at www.reneerutledge.com.

My First Post Office Run

The first time an agent requested the full manuscript of my novel, I arrived at the post office filled with hope and self-importance, imagining every song I’d heard on the drive over about living out your dreams was about me. After one year of writing, I had a full draft in hand, delusionally thinking I was done.

Prior to my trip to the post office, I had watched 200 pages take a minute each for my OfficeJet printer to crank out. Afterward, I’d checked the order carefully for missing pages, spent too much time at OfficeMax to get just-the-right-size box and stickers for the mailing labels, then secured each sticker with clear packing tape. I then taped around the edges of the box as well as once around, horizontally and vertically. I finished by writing the exclusive words “Requested Manuscript” on the outside in black Sharpie, satisfied this would get it past the slush pile.

The clerk at the post office was also Filipino. I thought he would ask me what I was sending and make friendly banter with me so I could talk about the book. Instead, I got on his nerves for my confusion about priority versus first class, and he got on mine for his exasperation to explain it more than once. I left the post office vaguely worried he would sabotage my box, then checked the tracking website daily to monitor my manuscript’s safe passage to New York.

It made it but would be rejected soon afterward for being “not quite ready.” I’d spend the next year getting more requests for the full manuscript, followed by just as many rejections, then realizing what I already knew: The book needed revision. I went back to work, making long-awaited cuts, embarrassed at the state of the manuscript I’d had the gall to submit. I wrote a second draft, then a third. I changed the title to The Hour of Daydreams. It continued to attract bites. When agents requested an exclusive read, it held up the book for nearly six months at a time. Some agents never followed up at all.

Years passed. I changed jobs several times, moved, raised a young child, had a new baby, and became less idealistic about the pages I was sending. I still packaged my manuscript with care, holding on to my optimism while trying to remain realistic. I grew hardier as a writer, speculating on the whys and the hows and believing enough in the integrity of my work to keep going.

Then I re-read my book and knew exactly where it drifted. More importantly, I knew what to do about it. I continued along the pathways where the most solid sections of the novel were leading me, those that kept the story alive and interesting but that I’d somehow dropped along the way. When I finished my fourth draft, I was certain it was the final version, no matter how many times I’d have to mail it.

By now, Submittable was in popular use and electronic submissions were the norm. Even though I had a much faster printer that could multitask as a scanner and photocopier, I was glad I could easily submit the novel online, forgoing the packaging ritual, long lines, and postage cost. Among that first, tiny batch of queries was an attachment to an up-and-coming indie press, Forest Avenue, where my book would find a home.

After I’d signed, scanned, and emailed a contract to Forest Avenue Press, the next time I’d go to the post office would be with early galleys for reviewers. After that, ARCs with a cover design. Each time, I continued to possess lingering nerves about the reception the book would have but I tried to let them go, knowing I could control my writing, but not people’s reaction to it. Today, more than a year after the first galleys were off, I’ve got a new post office run on my to-do list: Send complimentary copies of the final book to Cristina Garcia, Erin Entrada Kelly, Vanessa Hua, and other authors I’m grateful for, whose blurbs are featured on it.

I’ve been sending The Hour of Daydreams around the country for eight years now, in various iterations. As the publication date drew near, the book was closer to being free, as was I. I’d grown older tending to it. A lot of things have changed since that first mailing, including the book title, the characters’ journeys, my journey.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the post office clerk. He’s still there, every time. Still indifferent to me, as he should be.

Sunday Sentence: There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce by Morgan Parker

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

You are alive because you are a question.

“The Book of Negroes” from
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce 
by Morgan Parker

Friday Freebie: The Last Kid Left by Rosecrans Baldwin

Congratulations to Jodi Paloni, winner of the previous Friday Freebie: A Line Made By Walking by Sara Baume.

This week’s contest is for The Last Kid Left by Rosecrans Baldwin. Keep scrolling for more information about the book...

The Last Kid Left begins when a car smashes into a sculpture of a giant cowgirl. The police find two bodies in the trunk. 19-year-old Nick Toussaint Jr. is arrested for murder, and after details of the crime rip across the internet, his 16-year-old girlfriend, Emily Portis―a sheltered teen who’s been off the grid until now, her first romance coinciding with her first cellphone―is nearly consumed by a public hungry for every lurid detail, accurate or not. Emily and Nick are not the only ones whose lives come unmoored. A retired police officer latches onto the case. Nick’s alcoholic mother is thrust into an unfamiliar role. A young journalist who left her hometown behind is pulled into the fray. And Emily’s father, the town Sheriff, is finally forced to confront a monstrous secret. The Last Kid Left is a bold, searching novel about how our relationships operate in a hyper-connected world, an expertly-portrayed account of tragedy turned mercilessly into entertainment. And it’s the suspenseful unwinding of a crime that’s more complex than it initially seems. But mostly it’s the story of two teenagers, dismantled by circumstances and rotten luck, who are desperate to believe that love is enough to save them.

If you’d like a chance at winning The Last Kid Left, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on June 8, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on June 9. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

Had a Great Time, Wish You Were There

Miss me? Wondered where I'd gone? Or perhaps you never noticed The Quivering Pen was off the airwaves for the better part of two months (hey, I have no illusions this blog is smaller than a pimple on a gnat's cheek when it comes to the Important Things in Life).

My apologies for the unexplained disappearance of The Quivering Pen whose content dried up in the middle of April. A variety of factors managed to put the blog in a coma:

1.  I got very busy at The Day Job.
2.  My laptop computer died.
3.  I took a trip to Europe.

I couldn't do much about #1, I recently resolved #2 (kisses and hugs to the new MacBook Air), and I'd already sort of planned to be off the grid during #3. But yeah, I could have left a note saying I'd just stepped out and would be back soon.

Content will soon be flowing once again at the Pen, but in the meantime, I thought I'd share some photos I took during the joyous, unplugged two weeks of #3.

Late last week, my wife Jean and I returned from a long float down the Danube, Main, and Rhine Rivers aboard the Viking River Cruises' longship Mimir, traveling from Budapest to Amsterdam. This was only my second visit to Europe. The last time was in 1976 when I took a high-school trip to London, Paris, Rome and Switzerland. I'd never been anywhere near Hungary, Austria, Germany or The Netherlands (a brief layover in a German airport en route to Iraq in 2005 doesn't count). This was going to be the trip of a lifetime--one which I'd promised Jean on our wedding day 33 years ago--and I vowed to soak in as much of the scenery and culture as I could. I hope these photos give you some idea of just how much soaking I did during the 15 days we were abroad.

Since this is a book blog, I'll mention my primary reading material: A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, first published in 1977 and re-released by New York Review Books in 2005. After doing a hasty, pre-trip Google search for books about the Danube, I discovered this literary gem which had been hiding in plain sight all along. A Time of Gifts is Fermor's travelogue-memoir about his walk from "the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube" in 1933. The eighteen-year-old Fermor left his native England to "set out across Europe like a tramp." Double-check that date and you'll see that his long-walk odyssey came at a particularly volatile time in European history. Some of the most dramatic scenes in the book involve local Germans and their intolerance of the brown-shirts of the Nazi Party who were then on the rise.

I used Fermor's narrative as a sort of antique guidebook in my own journey up the Danube. I should note, however, that Fermor's west-to-east course was the opposite of mine. Plus, he started his walk in the dead of winter. I, on the other hand, had to endure Easy-Bake-Oven temperatures in the high 70s (which sounded great to nearly everyone else aboard the Mimir except this Rocky Mountain Boy). I'll sprinkle some quotes from A Time of Gifts throughout the slide show below.

Bon Voyage!

Budapest at night

Viennese coffeehouse

We headed for a coffee house in the Karntnerstrasse called Fenstergucker. Settling at a corner table by the window near a hanging grove of newspapers on wooden rods, we ordered Eier Im Glass, then hot Brotchen and butter, and delicious coffee smothered in whipped cream.

Somewhere in the Wachau Valley

The footpath along the southern bank was leading me into the heart of the Wachau....Castles beyond counting had been looming along the river. They were perched on dizzier spurs here, more dramatic in decay and more mysteriously cobwebbed with fable.

Pug life in Regensburg

Nuremberg

Bamberg

Not high-heel-friendly

Sherwin-Williams should have a paint color called Bamberg Blue

Ivy league

Jean and I both agree Wurzburg was the best burg!

Marksburg Castle

Still Life with Fowl, Marksburg Castle

"Tis but a scratch...I've had worse."
My Monty Python moment

Koblenz

Koblenz

A point like a flat-iron jutted into the river and a plinth on its tip lifted a colossal bronze statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I many yards into the air among the sparrows and gulls.

Cologne

The Happy Sausage

Fake Wedding: model behavior outside Cologne Cathedral

After a first faraway glimpse, the two famous steeples grew taller and taller as the miles that separated us fell away. At last they commanded the cloudy plain as the spires of a cathedral should, vanishing when the outskirts of the city interposed themselves, and then, as I gazed at the crowding saints of the three Gothic doorways, sailing up into the evening again at close range. Beyond them indoors, although it was already too dark to see the colours of the glass, I knew I was inside the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe.

Cologne Cathedral

#NoFilter: Stained glass inside Cologne Cathedral

On our last day, we visited a cheese farm near Giessenburg, Holland

Blessed are the cheesemakers....

Don Quixote Fever: one of 19 windmills at Kinderdjik, Holland

There were the polders and the dykes and the long willow-bordered canals, the heath and arable and pasture dotted with stationary and expectant cattle, windmills and farms and answering belfries, bare rookeries with their wheeling specks just within earshot and a castle or two, half-concealed among a ruffle of woods.

Not to scale

My spirits, already high, steadily rose as I walked. I could scarcely believe that I was really there; alone, that is, on the move, advancing into Europe, surrounded by all this emptiness and change, with a thousand wonders waiting.

Kinderdjik, Holland: looking ahead at one of the thousand wonders of Europe

Sunday Sentence: Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

If she was an angel, the girl at whom Sam was pointing, she was an angel of ice; slim, shining, ash-blonde, her self-possessed voice very cool as she parried the complimentary teasing of half a dozen admirers; a crystal candle-stick of a girl among black-and-white lumps of males.

Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis

Friday Freebie: A Line Made By Walking by Sara Baume

Congratulations to Gayla McCann, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: I Found You, the new novel by Lisa Jewell.

This week’s contest is for A Line Made By Walking by Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither. Here’s what novelist Joseph O’Connor had to say about A Line Made By Walking: “After a remarkable and deservedly award-winning debut, here is a novel of uniqueness, wonder, recognition, poignancy, truth-speaking, quiet power, strange beauty and luminous bedazzlement. Once again, I’ve been Baumed.” Keep scrolling for more information about the book...

Struggling to cope with urban life—and life in general—Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to her family’s rural house on “turbine hill,” vacant since her grandmother’s death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by countryside and wild creatures, that she can finally grapple with the chain of events that led her here—her shaky mental health, her difficult time in art school—and maybe, just maybe, regain her footing in art and life. As Frankie picks up photography once more, closely examining the natural world around her, she reconsiders seminal works of art and their relevance. With “prose that makes sure we look and listen,” (The Atlantic) Sara Baume has written an elegant novel that is as much an exploration of wildness, the art world, mental illness, and community as it is a profoundly beautiful and powerful meditation on life.

To entice you with a taste of Baume’s writing, here’s the first paragraph of the book:

      Today, in the newspaper, a photograph of tribesmen in the Amazon rainforest. The picture taken from a low-flying aircraft. The men naked but for painted faces, lobbing spears into the air as high as they can lob them, trying to attack the largest and most horrifying sky-beast they’ve ever encountered, ever imagined. The caption says they are believed to be from the last ‘uncontacted’ tribe.
      What a thing, I think, that there are still. People. Out there.
      And almost immediately, I forget.

If you’d like a chance at winning A Line Made By Walking, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on April 20, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on April 21. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

Sunday Sentence: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

Sweat makes the shirts look like maps.

“Porch Chair” from What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

Friday Freebie: I Found You by Lisa Jewell

Congratulations to Brittany Mishra, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie: Quicksand by Malin Persson Giolito.

This week’s contest is for I Found You, the new novel by Lisa Jewell. Here’s what Library Journal had to say about the book: “Jewell is a wonderful storyteller. Her characters are believable, her writing is strong and poetic, and her narrative is infused with just enough intrigue to keep the pages turning. Readers of Liane Moriarty, Paula Hawkins, and Ruth Ware will love it.” Keep scrolling for more information about the book...

In a windswept British seaside town, single mom Alice Lake finds a man sitting on the beach outside her house. He has no name, no jacket, and no idea how he got there. Against her better judgment, she invites him inside. Meanwhile, in a suburb of London, twenty-one-year-old Lily Monrose has only been married for three weeks. When her new husband fails to come home from work one night she is left stranded in a new country where she knows no one. Then the police tell her that her husband never existed. Twenty-three years earlier, Gray and Kirsty are teenagers on a summer holiday with their parents. Their annual trip to the quaint seaside town is passing by uneventfully, until an enigmatic young man starts paying extra attention to Kirsty. Something about him makes Gray uncomfortable—and it’s not just that he’s playing the role of protective older brother. Two decades of secrets, a missing husband, and a man with no memory are at the heart of this brilliant new novel, filled with the beautiful writing, believable characters, pacey narrative, and dark secrets that make Lisa Jewell so beloved by audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

If you’d like a chance at winning I Found You, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie remains open to entries until midnight on April 13, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on April 14. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

On Influence and Tributaries: Edie Meidav Remembers Herb Caen

On Influence and Tributaries
by Edie Meidav

You may have gone so far as to imagine your own funeral but what kind of person foresees writing so strenuously that his last words will script his own obituary?

“It will trail off at the end, where I fall face down on the old Royal with my nose on the ‘I’ key.”

I came to discover the writer of these words, gone now twenty years, the way people once found broadsides: on the most dispensable paper, newsprint, the kind that leaves a slur of negative type on a table, and in the form of the daily column Herb Caen wrote for over sixty years in the Bay Area. Four years before his death, he had to quit the practice, having quipped that if he stopped seeing his name in print he would not know he still existed, but, seeing other opportunities for the act of inscription and glory, his will asked for fireworks to be set off, after his funeral, in San Francisco’s Aquatic Park.

When we moved from an inland suburb of Long Island to Berkeley, I was just eight and my first shock came in the lightness of air: in California, it seemed, you were meant to understand that not much held you up, not even the trusses on all the seismically-retrofitted buildings. You could just fly away, unpinned by the rigor of the East, and yet as consolation you were given an expanse into which you might dream a bit. That August, small fragrant yellow pinwheels I called cornflowers fell from a tree and littered the stairs up to our house and whenever I am back in California, the awe of cornflower air returns, again with its perfume of new freedom. Here you could walk without ever stopping, you could dream and make things, and if you didn’t walk, you could take not just trains but buses and boats.

Of course, in a sense you could do all these things and more cheaply and frequently and better in Long Island. Yet at least to my young mind, the gray of the world around had kept us compressed. Sometimes a neighborhood girl would take my brother and me a bit beyond our neighborhood so we could wait near a haunted Mafioso cemetery with cracked gray columns and a forbidding steel gate for my father to come home off the train from the United Nations where his profession seemed to have to do with being a perennially-frustrated idealist. In Berkeley, however, someone had turned up the light, and if there were cemeteries anywhere they were hidden from public view, behind unscratched brilliant pilasters or up the remote scorched hills. On trains in New York you could study signs not about cornflowers but about corns and hemorrhoids. In Berkeley you had to ask in the drugstore where aspirin was hidden. In this place, everything moved to health, everything efflorescing with liveliness like those cornflowers.

And the lexicographer of this exuberance was Herb Caen, the West Coast’s effusive Whitman, the coiner of the term beatnik, the man who called his city Baghdad-by-the-Bay for its multiculturalism, a repeater of the slogan that one should never call the city Frisco. Even as the Bay Area reckoned with the stale incense of buzzkill in the air, after the counterculture had landed like a snub-nosed paper airplane, even as avenues and parks were populated by all those who no longer bothered with the vanity of patchouli, vets high or frustrated or panhandling, even with the deinstitutionalization of patients out onto the streets, everything spilling out into an increasingly unfeeling polis, into the vacuum of each day, nonetheless there kept being this daily 1,000-word missive on the front of one section of The Chronicle, a little paean to joy and the way that it could resist the most lugubrious missteps and overarching views of politicians. Happiest when he could see the fancy in the grit and less so the reverse, Caen modeled a way of paying attention and engagement with all elements of a city. A latter-day heir of Walter Winchell whose bitterness was less, Caen had a greater moral force while at the same time being a romantic: his cries out for a nostalgic other San Francisco pierced my newish heart with the force of exile so that I grew up, notated by him, believing I belonged in that place. A dandy celebrating the presence of a good moment of camaraderie with his tipsters both famous and homeless, like the state itself he lived, as if a tightrope-walker bearing a parasol, at once in the past and the future. Though once it was joked that, having found some famous San Francisco sourdough sweet, Caen too had gone a little sour, I rarely found him anything but redemptive.

Though not everything about his work stunned me. I accepted certain features as part of a cosmos to which my citizenship was assured, but still skimmed quickly over: moments such as the puns or what he called namephreaks, discoveries of local people in professions with oddly fitting or absurd names such as that of my pediatrician, one Grange S. Coffin.

More importantly, prefiguring so many other people I would come to admire, Caen was my first flaneur, a skirter around the edge of urban life, hearkening back to the grace and gentility of a prior era. Imagine Leonard Cohen as columnist. The strangest part, for a man so devoted toward mourning the passing of the present moment, was that Caen seemed to know everyone who had formed the history of San Francisco, as if he were a timeless tuxedo’d turtle, around since the place had been the Barbary Coast through its time of Italian opera singers, the Enrico Carusos and a gogo girl like the image of Carol Doda whose giant sign on Columbus still boasted the on-off flickering nipples. Caen loved the crass and the genteel, creating each day a city that forgave others its foibles, passionate about San Francisco in the way that people from the boroughs or farther precincts can love Manhattan. Instead of writing of the heights of skyscrapers, Caen wrote of wisps of fog. Because of his talent in locating the city as a literary map itself, to read him in the morning was a way to understand our new land. He himself was a striver, liking to claim his own origin myth, pointing out that his parents had visited San Francisco nine months before his birth in Sacramento, all the way back in the mists of 1916.

Why bother recognizing him today? Never mind that once Silicon Valley came along, it recognized Caen as the prince of all blogs. Perhaps it might be best to remember Caen in this moment because he was, among all his virtues and voices, a chronicler of social protest: he knew that within the most specific flower blew the most universal wind. Rather than write about the rise and fall of movements, he sought out the small human moments within a crowd, and by doing so made clear how certain beliefs could become dangerously institutionalized within a given landscape or architecture. To read him was to read a humanist who left you with questions about your role in a greater social order.

Herb Caen: April 3, 1916 – February 1, 1997

In this strange time of ours, do we not need to find our Herb Caen, someone who can document the specific in our momentous warp and woof?

Jung famously said the single greatest influence on the child are the unfulfilled desires of the parent. If we can have literary parents, only because I would like to be among those who might claim him, I wish to think Caen too might have wanted to write novels and stories. Or perhaps, as is more likely the case, he was a man who found life replete, overjoyed to have written more than 16,000 columns of 1,000 words each. As one commentator said, his was “an astounding and unduplicated feat”: he created by far the longest-running newspaper column in the country. In the year before his death, in February 1996, a colleague of his wrote: “What makes him unique is that on good days his column offers everything you expect from an entire newspaper–in just 25 or so items.” Can we expect any less?

Edie Meidav is the author of three novels, including Lola, California. Her short story collection, Kingdom of the Young, was just released by Sarabande Books. She teaches in the UMass Amherst MFA program. Find her on Twitter at @lolacalifornia

Sunday Sentence: The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

They were like a pair of leopards, held too long in a zoo. Remarkable, but a little ruined.

The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle