A Personal Anthology, by May-Lan Tan
'Bullet in the Brain' by Tobias Wolff (first published in The Night in Question. Read online)
“In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet's tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce.”
'Recitatif' by Toni Morrison (Read online)
“We sat on the ground and breathed. Lady Esther. Apple blossoms. I still go soft when I smell one or the other.”
'Boys' by Rick Moody (from Demonology. New York: Faber and Faber, 2000. Read online)
“The boys are ugly, they are failures, they will never be loved, they enter the house.”
'My Daughter the Racist' by Helen Oyeyemi (from Mr Fox. London: Picador, 2011. Read online)
“The soldiers remind me of the boys from here sometimes. The way our boys used to be.”
'Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice' by Nam Le (from The Boat. New York: Knopf, 2008.) Online at Zoetrope-All Story.
“We were two animals in the dark, hacking at one another, and never since have I felt that way—that sense of consecration.”
'Trouble and Troubledness' by Juliet Escoria (from Black Cloud. New York: Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2014.)
“But sometimes you just want to make something on yourself that will never go away, something you shaped, something that will be there forever: a sign for someone else to find.”
'The Library of Babel' by Jorge Luis Borges (From Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 1962. Read online)
“There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god.”
'San' by Lan Samantha Chang (From Hunger. New York: Penguin, 2000.)
“Things fall apart, it seems, with terrible slowness. I could not see that true mathematics, rather than keeping track of things, moves toward the unexplainable.”
'The Toughest Indian in the World' by Sherman Alexie (The Toughest Indian in the World. New York: Grove, 2001. Read online.)
“He wanted to change their minds about salmon, he wanted to break open their hearts and see the future in their blood, because he loved them.”
'El Paso' by Jayne Anne Phillips (From Black Tickets. New York: Delacorte, 1979. Read online)
“She had the look of someone didn’t sweat much, just burned a coal inside.”
May-Lan Tan is the author of Things to Make and Break. @amanlyant