Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
“For the last twenty years, until recently, Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories were the template of ethnic fiction that supports the fantasy of Asian American immigrants as compliant strivers. The fault lies not in Lahiri herself, who I think is an absorbing storyteller, but in the publishing industry that used to position her books as the “single story” on i
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filled with the kind of determined cheer that masked a deeper despair.
Ruth Ozeki • The Book of Form and Emptiness: A Novel
The chocolate cake was good, Momo said. We had milk, too. Warm milk. In the shop, I noticed that the back of Momo's neck smelled. It smelled sweet. Her growing up repulses me. It is not her growing that disgusts me, but the growing itself. She casts off unneeded things. So many things. She can't help herself. And so I pity her. Her youth, her ignor
... See moreHiromi Kawakami • Manazuru
Makiko looked old. Everyone looks older as the years go by, but that’s not what I mean. She wasn’t even forty, but if she told you “I just turned fifty-three,” you’d wish her happy birthday. She didn’t look older. She literally looked old.
Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett, • Breasts and Eggs
“In the summer of 2008, when I was working as a beleaguered junior editor at a news magazine, I used to distract myself by visiting the Strand Bookstore, near Union Square in Manhattan, and rescuing one yellowing, waterlogged book from the dollar carts outside. There was a bizarre urgency to these missions for me—I kept imagining the fate of the bo
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