Mein Stapel ungelesener Bücher bleibt hoch und meine Entschuldigung ist, dass es im Internet einfach viel-zu-viele Menschen gibt, die tolle Artikel schreiben. In letzter Zeit:
The Protagonist Is Never in Control von Emily Fox Kaplan
Even now, you remember it clearly: the cold bolt of fear, how the two of you struggle to knock his wrist aside. How you realize that your power is no match for his. In your memory, you can hear his laugh get louder. You understand that he knows what he is doing. And you understand that he enjoys it.
Even at four, you know what he is. He is a bad man. He is a man who likes to make little girls feel scared. And you know that he is a man who gets away with everything.
(…)
Some of your fondest memories in the coming years will be of reading in the woods.
(…)
You figure out which genres you love and which ones you don’t. You like historical fiction, stories of brave, precocious kids in troubled times. You like science fiction, and series about normal kids with everyday problems — strict teachers, bullies, beloved pets who die.
(…)
And then there are the stories where, midway through, the premise shifts beneath you, where you realize that everything you thought you knew was false. You learn that these stories have what’s called an unreliable narrator. These are the scariest stories of all.
The Protagonist Is Never in Control von Emily Fox Kaplan
One Story House von Alice Florence Orr
Crail always felt like a faraway place despite only being an hour and a half in the car. Our drives there were coloured by radio hits and piglet-pink motion sickness tablets, saccharine pills that did little to settle a child’s stomach other than prime it for the cascade of gobstoppers and flying saucers she’d stuff in her wee mouth at the first opportunity. Those were the days before I could comprehend spatial distances, never mind distinguish between first and third person. My existence was distilled by an exponentially expanding series of destinations, each one completely disconnected from the other, and the car was less a vehicle than it was a teleportation device to other dimensions.
(…)
My granny never seemed to fit in around town. I’m not sure she ever tried. She always had a new yarn for my parents to endure while the kids obliviously scoffed ice cream sundaes we’d assembled ourselves, with whipped cream and squeezy strawberry sauce. My granny moaned about the frumpy do-gooder who dared to offer her a biscuit at the weekly coffee morning. She groaned about another intolerable visit from her sourpuss sister, waxed lyrical about a contractor with absolute cheek, whatever that was. There was also the increasingly frequent news that another soul she’d known for forty years had died in their sleep. Out of all her displeasures, this was the heftiest weight on her willow-thin frame.
(…)
Eight months into lockdown she sent her only letter. My eyes didn’t take in any of the scrawled words. Instead, they settled on the small, amateurish drawing at the bottom, scratched into the paper with a blunt pencil. It was of an old woman sporting a cartoonish bowl cut. She had little grey specks for eyes, harshly pressed into the paper. Her mouth gurned in displeasure. Across her avatar, my granny had marked four vertical lines with an expiring biro pen, then the word help enclosed inside a speech bubble, floating free an inch above her ink-clad bars.
(…)
Jean forgot a lot of things towards the end. But she always remembered her husband, though she tended to forget that he died ten years before. She remembered my dad, and his visits during lockdown, even if they were never in order. She also remembered my brother’s new pronouns when so many able-bodied people seemed to forget. This is how I’d like to remember her.
One Story House von Alice Florence Orr
When I Met the Pope von Patricia Lockwood
When I Met the Pope von Patricia Lockwood
The invitation said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs. ‘He has to be the whitest. And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’
The flight to Rome is sentient; it knows exactly where I’m going and what to provide. At my gate, I find myself sitting next to a guy eating a massive perfect panini. He smells like ten men, perhaps because of the additional paninis he is smuggling on his person. On the phone to his mother, he utters the immortal words: ‘And my sanweeches’.
(…)
Sometimes they come up and sing a word directly in your ear. We’re supposed to be offended, but I actually find it valiant, considering the severity of my sock indentations. Then I realise it’s all for Hope: in the US, she is blonde, but here she is gold.
(…)
Those six words every girl wants to hear: an Irish bishop is sponsoring me. He finds us at the welcome party on the second night at the Vatican Museums. Afterwards he takes us out to dinner, where I somehow, and to his grave disappointment (he had recommended the pasta), order the deepest salad in the world. There is literally no bottom to it, like mercy.
When I Met the Pope von Patricia Lockwood