Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Tarpley Hitt, online editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, associate editor

From Antoine Volodine’s novel The Monroe Girls (Archipelago), translated from the French by Alyson Waters, an encounter in a hospital for schizophrenics:

The comment led to a silence. Everyone was trying to imagine the dark street, unknown, with weird things occurring there. The guy near the door pushed the light timer and the central globe lit up, first with a red glimmer, then a sickly glow. It was an energy-saving lamp and, for thousands of hours, it had been saving its energy and diffusing a light for the dying and sustainable development. When we were in this bedroom, Breton and I, we generally preferred the slightly brighter light from the two streetlamps in the courtyard.

“No point staying in the dark,” commented the guy, as if to excuse himself for having modified the lighting.

In Breathing Space: The Architecture of Pneumatic Beings (Zone Books), Tim Altenhof discusses the Bauhaus guru Johannes Itten, whose back-to-nature philosophy increasingly alienated him from his technologically oriented colleagues, not least due to the odd, allegedly creativity-inspiring breathing exercises in which he instructed his students: 

His apprentices breathed more and more in solitude. Once, a guest was present during one of the seemingly grotesque exercises, and as Paul Citroen, one of Itten’s students, infers, he “must really have thought us mad.” Breathing was also a covert strategy for defense when an unwelcome character appeared, and Citroen recalls: “I remember meeting a disagreeable person. Muche introduced him to me, and I started the appropriate breathing exercises immediately to make any contact with him impossible, to undercut any influence he might possibly have on me. The fellow noticed nothing of this, but Muche, who saw my nostrils flaring, was amused.”

From Rosemary Tonks’s Businessmen as Lovers (New Directions), first published in 1969:

‘They are all vulgar, that is typical of a nice man, darling. They never have any taste. It’s a good test of masculinity. All hairdressers are terrible unless you control them. They will make you into a burning bush or a skinned cat.’ She ties a skimpy pink cotton-silk handkerchief under her chin and has a really good look at herself in the mirror. ‘Does my nose stick out?’

‘No, Maddy, not too much. How can you tell if a man is really stuck on you?’

‘Yes, pink is not too bad for noses. It is navy-blue that gives you the Dong’s nose. Well, if he’s stuck on you he says very passionately, “Oh you!” If he says, “Oh, you darling,” it’s only sex.’

‘Gosh,’ I say, ‘then I’ve had some narrow squeaks.’

‘That’s right, darling. You go on and squeak. It’s quite right for a woman to squeak. Squeaking is pretty.’

In the prologue to Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy (Yale University Press), former New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent describes stumbling upon a little-attended-to anecdote in Meryle Secrest’s 1998 Sondheim biography—a nugget he found so odd and revealing it steered him into writing his book:

It arose in her account of the creation of Sweeney Todd (1978), the gruesome, stunning, and operatic story of a deranged barber who slits the throats of his customers, and whose landlady bakes the chopped-up remains into meat pies. After listening to Sondheim sing the first few songs for her, Hal Prince’s wife Judy—for much of his adult life, Sondheim’s most intimate friend and his acknowledged muse—stopped him cold. He had told her that he saw Sweeney as an amusement, a form of Grand Guignol, but she heard something different. “It’s nothing to do with Grand Guignol!,” she exclaimed. “It’s the story of your life!”

I could not find any further elaboration in Secrest’s book or in her interview tapes. Throughout her life Judy Prince has refused nearly all interview requests, including Secrest’s. But Secrest did quote Sondheim’s confirmation of her insight: “I was so shocked when Judy said that,” he said. “But then the light clicked on and I thought ‘But of course!’”

“It never occurred to me,” he continued. “It’s never been brought up in any article. Everybody always says, ‘Oh, he’s interested in murder?’” Then he said, They’re missing the point entirely.”

From Andrew Martin’s Down Time (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), when one character reminisces about a friend, recently killed in a bicycle accident:

She remembered birthdays, except when she didn’t. She had a T-shirt that said RESPECT THE MEAT, the letters styled as flames, that she’d worn all the time.

From Louise Erdrich’s short story, “Wedding Dresses,” in her new collection, Python’s Kiss (Harper): 

Merritt had promised Dora over and over that he loved her hair, that he wouldn’t dream of cutting it, that the very idea horrified him. He understood that shedding hair was her reaction to stress. He was pathetically sorry. She’d let her guard down, then awakened a week later, a lazy Sunday morning, with her hair all over the bed, sheared off raggedly. He’d gone for his run. She had gathered up her two-foot-long clumps of hair and locked him out of the apartment.