Contrapposto by Dave Eggers, r. Aug. 2026

Page 8 Cricket thought he might go outside and fill the can from the hose, but it was January, no more than ten degrees outside, the sky frozen and white, the trees terrified and bare.

Page 10 “You are contained,” Silas said. “You can visit with your mother, or spend time with me. Or you can go into the world outside and look at its endlessness. And always you have the life you can conjure on your own. You can produce beauty there in your notebooks, from scratch. And harmony. Chaos outside, order on your paper. Right?”

Page 15 Cricket looked at her and thought he recognized her. A grade above was another world. He saw those kids as he saw adults, teachers, cops. But she did look familiar. The boy, though, he didn’t know. He might be from out of town, a far more dangerous category of teenager. A teenager from out of town was capable of anything—even murder.

Page 28 But he circled and ovaled for a minute or so, and though his lines were more tentative and did not have Oana’s flourish and accuracy, in the end he created a general shape not unlike hers. He blinked rapidly at his drawing. It was, already, unlike anything he’d ever done. It was much like hers, and it was like the objects in front of him, and yet it was somehow his.

Page 36 He convulsed, and she massaged his head with her hands, round and round like a planetary storm.

Page 52 Jed had been held back, then kicked out and now attended the Boys Academy, a gloomy campus on the edge of town where the most wayward and unpromising young men went. Jed’s father was a cop.

Page 94 “I’m really glad you could come today,” she said, and put her hand on his. It was very warm and his childhood ended. Now he was a young man who women touched suggestively at the track.

Page 96 He closed his book, reshelved it and left the library through the side door. The door boomed when he opened it and whispered when it closed.

Page 96 Outside, the air was cold and crisp and hit him like love. The ancient trees stood over him, nodding in quiet tribute. When he got back to work, the Whistlestop smelled of cigarette smoke and snow. Jed was sitting at one of the dinettes with a woman of about twenty-two.

Page 135 He drew the log truthfully and stayed until dark. When he was finished he examined his work, feeling like the day could not have been spent in any better way. The day was gone but the drawing would remain. Art was remembering, documenting. Spending a day recording a day and thus freezing time.

Page 157 ...and the surfaces were alive, were untamed and varied and rewarded close inspection.

Page 166 “I recognize that many among you are not draftsmen. You are not interested in rendering the world as you see it. That is fine. The art world, in the last century, has made room for those who cannot draw. But I would ask that you, that we, resist a new, paradoxical tyranny wherein those without technical skill terrorize those who possess it. When we hound certain kinds of artists out of this school—hound out the most naturally and classically skilled, lord help us!—we engage in a kind of upside-down artistic fascism that reminds me of Pol Pot purging his country of intellectuals.”

Page 168 “Beauty justifies itself!” Carpenter yelled. “There is a perfectly inverse relationship between talent and the need to explain itself. The artist’s only rational response to ‘Why did you make this?’ is ‘Because I wanted to’ or ‘Because it felt right.’ Everything else is sophistry!”

Page 168 You have been fed the lie that intent is achievement. It is not. You have been fed the lie that explaining your ideas is the same as realizing them. It is not. You have been fed the lie that people enjoy looking at theories and gags and pranks. They do not. You have been fed the lie that your peers’ success means your failure. It is not. You have been fed the lie that greatness emerges from cruelty. This has never been true and never will be true. These group crits have no purpose and accomplish nothing. They kill the heroes and reward the scavengers. They must end.”

Page 178 As professors, they’re forced to talk, which leads to pronouncements, which lead to theories, and theories become rigid and quickly ridiculous.”

Page 189 And I had an anthropologist friend—he’d studied people all over the world for fifty years. He said the happiest people, in every society and every era, were those who created things, but without ambition. The people who make belts, vases, toys. You bring something new into the world, like a god, but without the human need to be recognized for it. Is that happiness?”

Page 244 The idea of creation was delicious, pure pleasure, while the execution of that idea was so often an unendurable slog ending in tragic disappointment. So rarely could he realize the image in his mind, and even if he could, what would he do with it? Show it in an empty gallery next to the work of Peter-James Flemming?

Page 247 Shit, what if that happens to us? Every day in art should be like running down a hill, arms waving, shrieking. Not sitting at a desk writing down auction prices. Are they nice to you at least?”

Page 253 “And I haven’t done anything yet. At thirty everyone judges you, right? You need something to have happened before thirty. Otherwise you’re late and worthless and all is lost.”

Page 276 When we create well, the world is good, he thought. We’ve wrestled amorphous ideas into knowable shapes, we’ve improved—even glorified—flesh on canvas, we’ve made something greater than ourselves.

Page 343 But rarely did anything go to plan, and it was even rarer to have a work of art received as hoped. And so what was left? What was left, what was the only refuge, was the simple joy in creation. In making something appear. But Kyle was not joyful. And Olympia was not joyful. And the workers in the studio were there to pay for their lives outside the studio. And the billionaires who bought Kyle’s work were investors, not lovers. So together, everyone involved, from Cricket on up—they were all engaged in a kind of factory that made beautiful, unnecessary things that meant very little to anyone who made them.

Page 360 She was a muscular, angular being—a practical person

Page 369 It was only in seeing friends, also on their joined journey of decline, that he saw aging’s wretched work.

Page 381 God, look at this. What do you think: Is there just enough beauty in the world, or too much? You have only two choices.” “Too much,” he said. “Good answer,” she said, and stood in the water, motionless for a long while.

Page 409 The quiet and sacred world of now that he’d tended had been punctured, and the past was rushing through, filling the room.

Page 413 “And yet it didn’t matter,” she said. “All these things we did, if only we knew how little any one of them mattered. You could do a thousand things in a life.”

The Uncool by Cameron Crowe, r. Jun. 2026

p. 84 I always felt that a favorite song has a mind of its own. It arrives just when you need it, and that arrival memory remains for the rest of time. Every time you hear the song, you can remember the feeling, like you're reading a diary entry. It's one of music's greatest gifts.

p. 106 Sometimes the story isn't the one you came to write but the one that finds you instead.

p. 126 "It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is in reality just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness." – Jerry Garcia

p. 200 "The best writing – the best music – is personal, and it takes a stand. Did you take a stand?"

p. 218 "I've learned to flow with myself. I honestly don't know where the real David Jones is. It's like playing the pea game. I've got so many shells I've forgotten what the pea looks like. I wouldn't know what it looked like if I found it. Being famous helps put off the problems of discovering myself. That's the main reason why I've always been so keen on being accepted and why I've strived so hard to put my brain to artistic use. In any other profession I don't think I'd survive very long in an established society. I'm gonna have terrific problems one day ... I get that feeling." – David Bowie

p. 256 "Here's the thing," she said forcefully. "You have two options. You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They're going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they're going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So, of the two options," she concluded, "I'd rather be crucified for changing." – Joni Mitchell

p. 274 As I looked at the photo now in [Gregg Allman's] weathered and tattooed hands, it occurred to me that the entire goal of Almost Famous had always been simple – to capture that moment of promise.

p. 285 "I've outlived everybody's desire to be around me," [Cameron Crowe's mom Alice] said softly. Without self pity. Just a student of human behavior.

p. 289 I heard myself sound different [in the hospital, talking with the doctor about his mom's imminent death]. A strange nobility can take over in situations like this. Suddenly, you are the righteous hero of your own movie. You take a little bit from Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, or a lot from a hundred different television shows, and you combine it with the best version of yourself. I figured out a name for it. Hero adrenaline.

p. 299 Standing in the courtyard, I learned that over time the details fade. What lasts is the way someone made you feel.

Centennial by James Michener, r. May 2026

p. 10 That's why we stay in business – facts are important to us, but understandings are vital. We inject a high percentage of understandings in our rag and we're asking you to help us on our next big project.

p. 42 [The Pawnee Buttes] were extraordinary, these two sentinels of the plains. Visible for miles in each direction, they guarded a bleak and silent empire.

p. 70 Mammals, unlike reptiles, had some capacity for memory, and as the trek to the northwest continued, the chestnut felt sorrow and the loss if his mate and the colt, but the recollection did not last long, and he was soon preoccupied with the problems of the journey.

p. 103 The vast plains had a nobility that would never diminish, for they were a challenge, with their duststorms, their wild blizzards, their tornadoes and their endless promise, if men treated them with respect. They were a resource inexhaustible in their variety but demanding in their love. In they years ahead they would terrify easterners and Europeans afraid of loneliness, but they would be a haven for all who understood them, and they would be loved in contrary ways and with harsh curses. The great plains – illimitable in both challenge and fulfillment.

p. 160 There was the tamed elk, too, that stayed about the camp in the north and the sounds of coyotes along the Arkansas when [the Arapaho] were planning to fight the Comanche, and the sandy places where the children played. They had possessed a universe of endless horizons and sunsets blazing with golden fire.

p. 275 They spent a good deal of time dissecting what a girl like Elly, an orphan with no prospects and less than mediocre looks, would have to do to catch a man like one of the rich Zendts, and Laura Lou concluded, "I think men like to be loved. Just loved."

p. 303 ...and in that moment the Zendts knew what moving west meant – the awful loneliness, the burden of rifles, the strange rivers flowing swift with mud, the unknown Indians lurking, the long, long trails with no homes and no lights at dusk. They had barely started; over half the continent lay ahead...

p. 482 Nate asked, 'Are they givin' that [14-year-old] boy whiskey?' and Poteet said, 'Three things a man's got to learn to handle – a gun, a glass of whiskey, and a girl. He don't learn by readin'.'

p. 493 In these last days Jim had his first good chance to study the plains of Colorado, and everything he saw pleased him: the golden-brown color, the gently rising sweeps, the hidden swales, the rounded hills, the limitless horizon darkening at the edges, and day after day of cloudless sky, an arc of blue enclosing an untouched paradise.

p. 494 God, he wished he could ride forever with these men. Just keep riding toward some distant horizon behind which the Comanche and the Kansans and the unfordable rivers lay. But it could not be. Trails end, and companies of men fall apart.

p. 584 'Back east, wherever you look, you see something. The world crowds in on you. I can't tell you how homesick I got for the prairies, where a man can look for miles and not see anything ... not feel crowded. Out here the human being is important ... not a lot of trees and buildings.'

p. 619 She cut him off. 'Here in Chicago it doesn't matter if you're an Indian. Life is better when no one knows who you are.' The bleakness of such reasoning was so contrary to the warm love he had known on that Texas farm with his mother, and so alien to the friendships he had experienced on the trail north with Poteet that he could not accept it. 'You must come home. Where people love you,' he pleaded.

p. 622 Life in western America had a majesty, and the memory of it possessed her.

p. 733 ...and the character of a society depends more upon what men thing of themselves than upon what they really are.

p. 828 'The earth gives you nothing, Morgan. It simply sits there and waits. It neither loves you nor hates you, but it does cooperate with men who are not afraid.'

p. 853 Garrett had assembled various theories about this American preference for isolation. When a Pilgrim was thrown onto the shore at Plymouth he faced only wilderness, and from it each man had chopped out his own little kingdom. He had to wrestle with loneliness, learn to live with it and overcome it. If he could not do this, he could not survive. Traipsing off to the town meeting was not the basic characteristic of New England life; it was going back afterward to the loneliness of one's own cottage.

p. 864 Masterpieces are like that; they require an active participation and offer nothing to those who are unwilling to contribute.

p. 908 'I could live anywhere in America ... anywhere in the world, I suppose ... But I keep livin' in that old clapboard house my grandpappy built. You know why? A man needs roots. Specially a singin' man tryin' to catch at the heart of people. He needs to know where his pappy worked and which families his mom did washin' for. When he walks down the street it's got to be his street....'

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, r. Apr. 2026

37% There are hundreds of letters. Into the thousands, I expect. And to think, each one has a counterpart somewhere. Even if it's in a trash heap.

74% If you do find anything, Harry, please refrain from sending me an email with long strings of characters in blue I'm meant to click. The last time you did that, I became so lost in the Internet, I had to press the button on the computer itself to turn it off, and then start over when I turned it back on.

93% "What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace.... Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time." – Joan Didion

The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut, r. Mar. 2026

p. 65 So we did what we had to do [in Hungary, pre-WWII]. We had fun. We played. We got drunk and danced from one war to the next. What else were we supposed to do? We all knew that the wonderful world that had been built for us was coming to an end. So our games were urgent. Necessary. We simply had to have fun. There was nothing else for us. Because we knew what was coming. I don't know how, we just did. All of us. Men and women. Rich and poor. Jews and goyim. All knew. So we behaved like children and did what children do best. Pretend that there was nothing wrong and continue to play. The world would have to take care of itself.

p. 198 You could tell the quality of his thinking by what he chose to ask (questions being the true measure of a man).

p. 221 "Gods are a biological necessity," he said to me on a particularly warm night at his home in Georgetown, during that last summer when he could still get around on crutches, "as integral to our species as language or opposable thumbs." According to [John von Neumann], faith had afforded the primeval peoples of the world a source of strength, power, and meaning that modern man lacked completely; and it was this lack, this profound loss, that now had to be addressed by science. "We have no guiding star," he told me, "nothing to look up or aspire to, so we are devolving, falling back into animality, losing the very thing that has let us advance so far beyond what was originally intended for us."

p. 271 "Our earthly existence, since it in itself has a very doubtful meaning, can only be a means towards a goal of another existence. The idea that everything in the world has a meaning is, after all, precisely analogous to the principle that everything has a cause, on which the whole of science rests." – Kurt Gödel, letter to his mother

p. 350 "After that, I [Lee Sedol] continued playing but I had already decided to retire. With the debut of AI, I've realized that I cannot be at the top, even if I make a spectacular comeback and return to being the number one player through frantic efforts. Even if I become the best that the world has ever known, there is an entity that cannot be defeated."

The Nix by Nathan Hill, r. Mar. 2026

p. 98 It always went like this. The kids who were victims of the Nix always felt, at first, fear. Then luck. Then possession. Then pride. Then terror. ... "The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst."

p. 153 Example: At recess, he left. He simply marched away. He walked toward the most distant swing set and then walked on. He just didn’t stop. It had never occurred to him before that he could not stop. Everyone stopped. But in the face of his mother’s goneness, all the world’s normal rules fell away. If she could leave, why couldn’t he? So he did. He walked away and was surprised how easy it was. He walked along the sidewalk, didn’t even attempt to run or hide. He walked in plain view and nobody stopped him. Nobody said a word. He floated away. It was a whole new reality. Maybe, he thought, his mother also found it this easy. To go. What kept people where they were, in their normal orbits? Nothing, he realized for the first time. There was nothing to stop anyone from, on any given day, vanishing.

p. 274 Time heals many things because it sets us on trajectories that make the past seem impossible.

p. 344 The human body is so fragile. It’s ruined by the smallest things. You can put twenty bullets into a camel and it will just keep coming for you, but half an inch of shrapnel is enough to kill us plain little people. Our bodies are the thin knife’s edge separating us from oblivion.

p. 469 Sometimes what we avoid most is not pain but mystery.

p. 500 All of this so reflexive and automatic and habituated and slow that the travelers were a little zoned out and playing with their phones and just simply enduring this uniquely modern, first world ordeal that is not per se “difficult” but is definitely exhausting. Spiritually debilitating. Everyone feeling a small ache of regret, suspecting that, as a people, we could do better. But we don’t. The line for a McRib was quiet and solemn and twenty people deep.

p. 506 “Sometimes the country thinks it deserves a spanking, sometimes it wants a hug,” Periwinkle said. “When it wants a hug, it votes Democrat. I’m hedging on it’s a spanking moment right now.”

p. 543 The shutter clicks. Ginsberg stands and smiles sadly. He moves on, swallowed by the vast crowd, the incandescent day.

p. 560 The best way to feel like you really belong to a group is to invent another group to hate.

p. 563 She wants to prove that she’s gone through the terror of the day and now she’s stronger and better, even though she doesn’t know if she really is. How can one tell when one becomes a stronger and better person? Through action, she decides.

p. 564 In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what’s usually ignored is the fact that each man’s description was correct. What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind—it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp.

p. 618 Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.

p. 619 But Faye’s opinion is that sometimes a crisis is not really a crisis at all—just a new beginning. Because one thing she’s learned through all this is that if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change.

The Missing Ink by Philip Hensher, r. Mar. 2026

p. 49 It's perfectly possible to enjoy unattainable aspiration while practising a basic version of the art form.

p. 153 The wonderful transformation of writing with a reliable ink reservoir, or transportable bottles of ink, would have been accompanied by a jettisoning of the writing companions of decades – sometimes without the faintest regret, sometimes with a tinge of sadness that things had changed. We gaze at these things, now so useless, and try to garner the faintest sense of the human investment which once went into them.

p. 201 [Proust] is from one of the first generations of thinkers to stress that handwriting is utterly individual, saying that 'everyone, however humble, is a master of those familiar little household creatures whose life lies as it were suspended on the paper, that is, the unique characters of his handwriting which he alone possesses.'

p. 255 Some part of the writer's spirit had passed into the handwriting, and had stayed there. Her humanity and her hand overlapped, and something remained, indelibly, in these physical traces.