The Best Stuff I Read This Week

“I used to cry in a genre no one read.”

— Ocean Vuong / “Nothing” / Time Is A Mother

“I met my wife the old-fashioned way: on a dating app. When our now-toddler is older we’ll tell her this story and she’ll look at us like we’re embarrassing dinosaurs and say ‘mums, what’s a dating app?’”

— Arwa Mahdawi / “The Week in Patriarchy” / The Guardian

“He asks her to climb a ladder so that he may see her legs, whether a pig can walk through them.”

— Shelley Wong / “A Marriage at Ancestral Hall in Sun Village”

“‘The Company,’ as it came to be known, was the continent’s first industrial-scale resource extractor, and it pioneered an approach to business, markets, employees, and the natural world that together could be called ‘wildfire economics.’ Using furs as fuel, the European market as fire, and credit as oxygen, the Hudson’s Bay Company burned its way across the North American continent, altering it forever while generating extraordinary wealth for a handful of men an ocean away.”

— John Vaillant / Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

“Silently
time passes.
The only life I have
submits to its power.”

— Hatsui Shizue / “[Silently]”

“Yet America as a subliminal presence remained everywhere, if not more strongly than before. An ideology defined only by what it opposes is doomed to be defined by that exact thing. Even if there were no more KFCs, the CFCs looked pretty much the same. And so America could be felt in the layouts and fluorescent lights of the supermarkets; the familiar, loud graphic designs of billboards, advertisements, product packaging; the gleaming surfaces of malls; housing developments modeled after the suburbs of Orange County; a White House-like building that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a prison.”

— Ling Ma / “Tomorrow” / Bliss Montage

“We were sitting
at the kitchen table before his shift
at the sock factory. His eyes: raindrops
in a nightmare.”

— Ocean Vuong / “American Legend” / Time Is A Mother

What I’m Listening To:

“I don’t look like you
When the sunlight hits me
I’m golden, you’ll see”

— Lucinda Chua / “Golden”