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Acceptance: A Memoir
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by Emi Nietfeld (Goodreads Author)
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Acid West: Essays
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by Joshua Wheeler (Goodreads Author)
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Dec 29, 2025 05:34AM

 
Infinite Jest
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Dec 26, 2025 06:53PM

 
Book cover for The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
My mother raised me to be polite, to be demure. I have long operated under the idea that civility is subservience. But it hasn’t gotten me very far, that type of kindness. The world respects people who think they should be running it. I’ve ...more
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Jeanna Kadlec
“As an evangelical teenager, I didn't trust my own mind, too afraid to sin. Straying too far away from the early Christian internet could lead to temptation, to lust, to anger, to doubt. Perpetually aware of my own failings and ever the budding perfectionist, I aspired to a nearly ascetic level of spiritual self-discipline, which was in fact self-denial. I believe that I had chosen my faith for myself, not realizing that I had been conditioned all my life to be the ideal, obedient subject.”
Jeanna Kadlec, Heretic: A Memoir

Yaa Gyasi
“History is storytelling,’” Yaw repeated. He walked down the aisles between the rows of seats, making sure to look each boy in the eye. Once he finished walking and stood in the back of the room, where the boys would have to crane their necks in order to see him, he asked, “Who would like to tell the story of how I got my scar?”

The students began to squirm, their limbs growing limp and wobbly. They looked at each other, coughed, looked away.

“Don’t be shy,” Yaw said, smiling now, nodding encouragingly. “Peter?” he asked. The boy who only seconds before had been so happy to speak began to plead with his eyes. The first day with a new class was always Yaw’s favorite.

“Mr. Agyekum, sah?” Peter said.

“What story have you heard? About my scar?” Yaw asked, smiling still, hoping, now to ease some of the child’s growing fear.

Peter cleared his throat and looked at the ground. “They say you were born of fire,” he started. “That this is why you are so smart. Because you were lit by fire.”

“Anyone else?”

Timidly, a boy named Edem raised his hand. “They say your mother was fighting evil spirits from Asamando.”

Then William: “I heard your father was so sad by the Asante loss that he cursed the gods, and the gods took vengeance.”

Another, named Thomas: “I heard you did it to yourself, so that you would have something to talk about on the first day of class.”

All the boys laughed, and Yaw had to stifle his own amusement. Word of his lesson had gotten around, he knew. The older boys told some of the younger ones what to expect from him.

Still, he continued, making his way back to the front of the room to look at his students, the bright boys from the uncertain Gold Coast, learning the white book from a scarred man.

“Whose story is correct?” Yaw asked them. They looked around at the boys who had spoken, as though trying to establish their allegiance by holding a gaze, casting a vote by sending a glance.

Finally, once the murmuring subsided, Peter raised his hand. “Mr. Agyekum, we cannot know which story is correct.” He looked at the rest of the class, slowly understanding. “We cannot know which story is correct because we were not there.”

Yaw nodded. He sat in his chair at the front of the room and looked at all the young men. “This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on. But now we come upon the problem of conflicting stories. Kojo Nyarko says that when the warriors came to his village their coats were red, but Kwame Adu says that they were blue. Whose story do we believe, then?”

The boys were silent. They stared at him, waiting.

“We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”
Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

Neil Gaiman
“America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed. —AGNES REPPLIER, TIMES AND TENDENCIES”
Neil Gaiman, American Gods

James Thurber
“Beautiful things don't ask for attention.”
James Thurber, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Rebecca Solnit
“In the fall of 2017, we began to consider anew how violence, hate, and discrimination push people out, and how the stories we have are haunted by the ghosts of the stories we never got.”
Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises

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