(no subject)

Years ago, she made me a bird - a new, roughly-forged nugget of metal, amoebic, stylised. It was a seagull from one angle and a hawk from another. She smiled, a white flash in her sooty face. Fly, she said.

Now it's time for me to give the bird back, with its slippery unformedness, its lack of detail. I flew, and I've thought long and hard about what I found here, powered by this lump of ore. But it's not a finished product.

I'm the raw material. I have what I need in my head and my heart. But I need a spark from outside to take it further. It wasn't enough to fly from where I was and to gather experience like a magpie. Now I have to reforge it, and I don't know where to start. I'll need help.

I stretch out my arms. The familiar, comforting weight of the metal bird nestles on my palms. She watches, waiting. Opening my hands, I give it up, this much-welcomed gift I've come to love. I can't do this alone.

(no subject)

'delicate'
She'd been frail ever since she was born, with constant illnesses. Her family spent all their time taking care of her. One day she recovered, put on heavy walking boots and strode off into the mountains. They fell apart. Their lives had no purpose now.

This is for everyone who's already looking forward to November

THE NOVEL, WHEN EVERYONE WAS CONVINCED HE HAD ONE IN HIM

The novel is that art form that burns most easily. It so happened that in the middle of the nineteenth century, all the citizens of our shtetl - every man, woman and child - was convinced he had at least one novel in him...

More than seven hundred novels were written between 1850 and 1853. One began: How long it's been since I last thought of those windswept mornings. Another: They say everyone remembers her first time, but I don't. Another: Murder is an ugly deed, to be sure, but the murder of a brother is truly the most ghastly crime known to man.

There were 272 thinly veiled memoirs, 66 crime novels, 97 stories of war. A man killed his brother in 107 of the novels. In all but 89 an infidelity was committed. Couples in love wondered what the future would hold in 29; 68 ended with a kiss; all but 35 used the word 'shame'. Those who couldn't read and write made visual novels: collages, etchings, pencil drawings, watercolours. A special room was added to the Yankel and Brod Library for the Trachimbrod novels, although only a handful were read five years after their composition.

Once, almost a century later, a young boy went browsing the aisles.

I'm looking for a book, he told the librarian, who had cared for the Trachimbrod novels since she was a girl, and was the only citizen to have read them all. My great-grandfather wrote it...

What's it about? she asked.

It's about love.

She laughed. They're all about love.


(From Everything is Illuminated, the book I am currently laughing and crying over, when I'm not panicking that Jonathan Safran Foer is the same age as me)