« What Speaks To Us, Seemingly, Is Always The Big Event, The Untoward, The Extraordinary: The Front-page

“I undressed and left my clothes on the sand. I was not at ease with my body, not even in the darkness of night. It had been unloved, perhaps forever. Untouched by a lover for a long time. I didn’t know what to do with it when it was not in conversation with a piano. Or how to respond to the way Tomas gazed at the green jewel pierced through my belly button.”

— Deborah Levy, August Blue

“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? / And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”

— Ilya Kaminsky, from “A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck,” Deaf Republic

« The town looked golden and antique and the mountains next to us were covered with thin pine trees. Beirut, from this bench, was like a dream, a winding staircase of awkward memories and people who no longer were, who one day would no longer be. »

Nur Turkmani, Black Hole (Source: Rusted Radishes)

« To quote the tomb of leftist Jewish Egyptian activist Shehata Haroun, the father of Magda Haroun, the current president of the few remnants of the Jewish community who remain in Cairo: ‘Every human being has multiple identities, I am a human being, I am Egyptian when Egyptians are oppressed, I am Black when Blacks are oppressed, I am Jewish when Jews are oppressed, and I am Palestinian when Palestinians are oppressed.’ »

— Massoud Hayoun, When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History

My Women are Tabla & Qanoun by Nur Turkmani

"By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across - each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip - is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale." - Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati

Christine Lai, Landscapes

« I have a complicated relationship with walking. This has a lot to do, I suspect, with having grown up in Aligarh, a city in northern India, where walking on the streets came with intense male scrutiny, and the sense of being in a proscribed space. As a woman stepping out into its thoroughfares, I needed a reason to place my body on the street. I learned to display a posture of ‘work’ while walking, and to erase any signs that may hint at my being out for pleasure, for no reason at all other than to walk. All this means I see walking as a luxury, not something to be taken for granted. It is an act of autonomy and mobility I learned early to seize as a form of pleasure. I also grew adept at the allied skill of reading my terrain, looking out for signs that told me if it was open, or off-limits.

Being told not to walk was another way in which Kabul felt familiar. To map the city, I drew on the same knowledge and intuition that had helped me navigate the streets of my home town. Which is why, unlike the maps of guidebooks that seek to make checklists and establish authority, the routes I took were wandering and idiosyncratic. They were not trajectories of efficiency leading to a predetermined destination, nor were they maps of authority or delineation, offering control or explanation. These were routes of discovery – maps of being lost. To be lost is a way to see a place afresh, a way to reimagine a terrain that feels known. To be lost in Kabul is to find it – as a place of richness and possibility. »

Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul, Taran N. Khan

« I thought there was something wrong with the way the departments and majors were organized. Why were the different branches of literature categorized by geography and language, while sciences were categorized by the level of abstraction, or by the size of the object of study? Why wasn’t literature classified by word count? Why wasn’t science classified by country? Why did religion have its own department, instead of going into philosophy or anthropology? What made something a religion and not a philosophy? Why was the history of non-industrial people in anthropology, and not in history? Why were the most important subjects addressed only indirectly? Why was there no department of love? »

Elif Batuman, Either/Or

« Julian walks into the Duomo and a rush of cool air washes over him. There is a small group of students standing before the altar, and a few people are sitting in the pews. He finds a seat near the apse and rests his eyes briefly, before resuming his tour of the cathedral while listening to the Mahler symphony again on his headphones. Parts of the first movement have always struck him as discordant. Yet somehow the mess of interlocking notes works. It seems to him that the Gothic vaults and imposing columns of the cathedral share this quality of dissonance. He remembers vaguely something that Aidan once told him, that architecture could be likened to music; that music is, in turn, liquid architecture. And if music is a temporal art—the division and expansion of notes in time—that meant architecture, as petrified music, is frozen time. »

Christine Lai, Landscapes