“Replacement or rental relatives continue to feature in literature and film, and appeared in three recent Japanese movies I saw on airplanes. In one comedy, The Stand-In Thief, an orphan with no relatives forms emotional bonds with a series of isolated strangers whom he meets while breaking into a house; in another, a stepfather pays his stepdaughter’s deadbeat dad to spend time with her. The mood of these portrayals seemed to alternate between a kind of euphoria at the alchemy of the marketplace, which transforms strangers into loved ones, and a Truman Show–like paranoia that everyone you love is just playing a role.”
—“A Theory of Relativity,” Elif Batuman

“Jimmy Darling had gone to Graceland with a camera and said there was nothing to film there. Nothing to see. Except for the graffiti on the wall surrounding it.

Isn’t it all made to look glitzy and impressive? I asked.

Yeah, he said, it is.

What about the car?

The car, he said, was like the Virgin Mary on toast. Try to photograph it, and the miracle vanishes. He’d paid extra to see the airplanes. Elvis’s private jets. Inside one was a double bed. Stretched across it, over the covers, a super-wide airplane seat belt. Looking at the belted bed, and the one executive chair’s chair, near the window, Jimmy Darling felt the spirit of Elvis in the plane, up late, inside the night, hurtling across the sky, lonely as hell, no one with him in his darkest hour. Jimmy Darling was visited, in the airplane, by the wind of Elvis’s empty soul.”
—Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“What happened to me is I got tired. Being an addict is a constant hustle; it takes up so much energy. When I was in county after they picked me up, I had to kick because I had no access. After I kicked, I just knew, like a light got turned on. I was going to stay clean. Life was going to be different this time around.”
—Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“…change was an elusive thing. A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.”
—Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“…we could ride this out until the morning, maybe even sleep well. Then we could get to somewhere where they have rooms. We’d be rested. The sun might be up. The world might have ended. But at least it would be tomorrow. Tomorrow seems like the only thing that will solve anything, ever. Along comes tomorrow, with its knives, as someone or other once said. That’s not the exact quote, I’m sure, but the bones of it sound true.”
—Ben Marcus, “Stay Down and Take It”

“A husband is a bag of need with a dank wet hole at its bottom.”
—Ben Marcus, “Stay Down and Take It”

“‘You’re someone who writes novels, so I thought, wouldn’t he be interested in patterns of human behavior and all that? And the way I see it, with novelists, before even passing judgment on something, aren’t you supposed to appreciate its form? And even if you can’t appreciate it, you should at least accept it at face value, no?’”
—Murakami, “Barn Burning”

“I edit and add as the painting progresses, and in the end the work is a layering of its prior chapters. I wanted to show that process and reopen paintings that were already complete, to sort of tell their stories, and also to see their evolutions fixed on a page, like a developing photograph. The colored lines break the painted surface and reach out beyond the subject, releasing energy—again, like a photograph as it matures into clarity. As Leonard Cohen once said, ‘There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.’”
—Hung Liu, Zoetrope

“‘Yes,’ my grandmother said when the film ended. ‘Just don’t let there be another war.’

The phrase, which during Soviet times had become a kind of slogan, contained so much. Her husband, my grandfather, dying at the front; her parents, forced to evacuate Moscow despite her father’s poor health; in the midst of all this, her pregnancy and the birth of my mother. Just don’t let there be another war: a mixture of terror and hope.

We were sitting next to each other on the couch that became her cot at night. If my grandfather had survived the war, my grandmother could have had other children. Or if she’d remarried sooner than she did. If she’d had other children, they could have been here for her now, and she would have had more grandchildren, probably, than just me and Dima.

‘But you don’t get to say how your life is going to be,’ my grandmother said suddenly. And that was also true. On a whim, I took her hand in mine. For such a tiny little grandmother, she had surprisingly big hands.’”
—“How Did We Come to Know You?,” Keith Gessen

“‘At around this time…my husband began to change in ways that were so small they were impossible to identify and at the same time impossible to ignore. It was almost as if he had become a copy or forgery of himself, someone otherwise identical who nonetheless lacked the authentic quality of the original. And indeed whenever I asked him what was wrong, he would always say the same thing, which was that he wasn’t feeling quite himself. I asked our sons if they had noticed anything, and for a long time they denied it, but one evening, after the three of them had gone to a football match—something they did regularly—they admitted I was right and that he was somehow different. Again, it was impossible to say what the difference was, since he looked and behaved as normal. But he wasn’t really there, they said, and it occurred to me that this quality of absence might signify he was having an affair. And indeed one evening in the kitchen shortly afterward he suddenly said, very somberly, that he had some news for me. In that moment…I felt our whole life cleave apart, as though someone had cut it open with a great bright blade; I almost felt I could see the sky and the open air through the ceiling of our kitchen and feel the wind and rain coming through the walls. I had watched other couples separate…and it was usually like the separation of Siamese twins, a long drawn-out agony that in the end makes two incomplete and sorrowing people out of what was one. But this was so swift and sudden…a mere slicing of the rope that tethered us, that it felt almost painless. My husband was not having an affair, however,’ she said, tilting her head back toward the dull, gray sky and blinking her eyes several times. ‘What he had to tell me was not that our life together was over and that I was free, but that he was ill…an illness, moreover, that would not hasten his death but would instead blight every aspect of the life that remained to him. We had been married twenty years…and he could easily live twenty more, the doctors had told him, each day losing some fact of his autonomy and potency, a reverse kind of the evolution that would require him to pay back every single thing he had taken from life. And I, too, would have to pay…because the one thing that was forbidden to me was to desert him in his time of need, despite the fact that I no longer loved him and perhaps had never really loved him, and that, equally, he might not have ever loved me either. This would be the last secret we had to keep…and the most important one, because if this secret got out, all the others would, too, and the whole picture of life and of our children’s lived we had made would be destroyed.’”
—“Justice,” Rachel Cusk