When humankind felt they had done all there was to do on earth and wanted to come closer to God than they ever had before, it was decided that they would build a miracle, a tower so high and mighty, it would reach into heaven and they would come to know God, and thus be…
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Sun rays, light tones, blurring tail lights in the fast lane, a worn-out hat, a glass of lemonade – half-empty, golden hour, scent of ocean, a laugh trailing away. She sits on a wooden bench underneath the window sill, looking out into her backyard. She has lived a long life. She’s come to the…
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do you know the place where thistles grow, and lilies, too? do you know the place where aching is inevitable, and so is its reward; newfound hope? do you know the place where love is boundless, and so is death? do you know the place where darkness reigns, and so does light?…
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The concept of a moon had always seemed strange to him. That there should be a heavenly body up there somewhere, always crouching in the obscure, hidden in plain sight by the shadow of the world and all the while shining brightly for everyone else. How was it to be explained? Matter of the universe…
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Strong was never a word she thought of when people asked her to describe herself. Or rather; she did think of it for a fleeting second but dismissed it decidedly as fanciful thinking. She wasn’t a woman of wrong modesty, she knew her worth and her good traits. She knew that she knew how to…
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This novel’s set-out is simple: In Shaker Heights, everything is perfect. The city has been planned perfectly; the street lay-out is designed to eliminate traffic problems and there are rules for what shades of paint are allowed for each neighbourhood so that the houses look harmonious together – it’s a city where everything is planned…
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Whoever it was that made the mountains tall and the stars far-away and bright must have known about beauty and life, and the strangeness of it all. How come there’s an earth so perfectly tailor-made for every little being to co-exist; there’s the bees, which live their own little busy lives, with social ladders to…
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He served us wine and homemade Spanish tortilla and he spoke with a soft ‘c’ and his nose was sharp and his hair was sprawled out onto his back in black curls, and all the while he was rushing and talking and joking and smiling. He’s from the Basque country, he said. How come a…
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Since she could think, the lighthouse tower had always been there, and before that, too, printed in shapes and colours into the windings of her mind. It sat there on the rocky tongue of earth that slipped out into the ocean just to the right of the small harbour, where boats anchored, never more than…
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Words have always been her home, a respite from not quite being herself yet, a palace built out of sweat and ink for her to live in as long as she pleases, until she is old enough to not need them anymore (& she hopes she never will); a world of adventures and hope and…
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I forgot how much I love going to the cinema. In the past few weeks I’ve seen three films from this award season and each time I walked out of the movie theatre in somewhat of a daze, asking myself why the hell I hadn’t done this for so long. The great movies themselves aside,…
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He was taken aback. Whatever he had expected to come out of this, it certainly wasn’t this. He could have lived with rage, with spiky words thrown at him, refusal, anger, dismissal, anything. But silence? That was probably even worse. He heard his father’s footsteps, heard him tread up the windy staircase to the first…
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He had never been one for big words or grand gestures. If anything, these things appalled him. He held a subtle grudge against anyone who over-shared, overdid anything, over-imposed themselves in any way. He thought it bad taste. To him, the grace and beauty of a person lay in subdued elegance, quiet beauty, understated modesty….
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“We must try to see one another in this way.” – roger bevins iii “As suffering, limited beings- “ – hans vollman “Perennially outmatched by circumstances, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.” – roger bevins iii This novel is so strange in the way it’s told, so utterly unprecedented and special, I think one either loves…
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