Curated links.

Favorite Essays I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

• ‘My Boss Won’t Do Anything About My Slacker Co-worker’, The Cut
• The Weight of Her Grief, Karen Zey, The Sunlight Press
• Womb, The Audacity
• The Rage My Father Gave Me, The Cut

Favorite Flash Fictions I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

• Bead Lizards, Emily O. Gravett
• The First Music I Ever Heard Was the Music of My Mother, Caroline Wampole
• Blood Blonds, Vuyokazi Ngemntu

In this flash fiction, dialogue encompasses the whole story, and what a dialogue it is, every sentence spoken by the man and the boy is authentic, is filled with short sentences, sentences where we interrupt ourselves again and again, which is how we talk in real life. And, if you get emotional when you read moving words like me, there are heart-clutching moments in the dialogue where you need to blink away your tears.

Favorite Short Stories I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

• Bullshitting Our Way Through a Long Beijing Summer, Electric Literature
• Thursday, George Saunders

What a beautiful story.

I have a weird habit of collecting the best short stories I read in a folder on my laptop. Now this story sits in that folder. While reading, I laughed. I cried. After reading this story, I sat for a long moment before I reached for my phone to call my best friend. “Let me tell you about this short story I just finished reading,” I said to my friend.

Favorite Sentences I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

“It was, and is still, a relief to know that a writer as well respected and talented as Julie Lewis was so ‘rejected’; it meant that I could factor ‘rejection’ into my own career, and not be as devastated on each occasion as I might have been otherwise; being ‘rejected’ did not mean that I might not be successful overall.” –So Your Piece Has Been Rejected

“All he knew was the first time he saw her, he felt a soft bone somewhere in his body click, like a tiny dagger slotting into its sheath.” –Bullshitting Our Way Through a Long Beijing Summer

“The earth seems to understand that we’re behaving like a virus, and it has developed a fever to get rid of us.” –100 Years Ago, A Woman Told The World How Pointless Their Wars Were, Jessica Wildfire

Favorite Paragraphs I Read in the Past Two Weeks:

“The sun was dropping. From the shore of the lake came the singing of happy children. That singing might have come from any time, any place at all. Life (I felt, we felt) could hardly be sad, or over, if such sounds were still being made, and if, up a sidewalk, there could still come someone we had held dear for many years, who might, in what time was left, become both our sister for the first time and our sister again.” –Thursday, George Saunders

“Approach life advice not like immutable laws but rather like trying on clothes. Some advice will fit you well and flatter you. Other advice will not. Advice that may work great on one person may work terribly on the next. Pick and choose your advice to suit your personality and the occasion. Feel free to discard old advice any time it stops working for you.” –Mark Manson, How to Know What Works for You

And this paragraph made me cry:

“Gripping her cane, she led the way to a row of graves and stopped in front of a headstone. There it stood, a surprisingly tall marker, heralding her son’s name and lifespan dates. And below, with date of brith only, her name, and her husband’s engraved in stone. Along with the disquieting familiarity of those three names, the silvery quote read: His Smile Lit Up Our World. My throat tightened. How had she found this luminous line amid the darkness of her pain?” –The Weight of Her Grief, Karen Zey

Book Recommendation:

• Call And Response Stories, Gothataone Moeng

Etcetera

• The quality of mercy
• Samantha Irby doesn’t bet on a losing dog
• A 10-year-old jumps into action to help grandfather from drowning in pool
• 100 years ago, a woman figured out that countries actually fight over resources
• When pregnancy is the crime
• How hair discrimination affects black women at work
• What happened when I saw my book at a bookstore for the first time
• Grammy Awards to add awards for best African music performance, best pop dance recording, and best alternative jazz album