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“Perhaps glass and memories are only painful as fragments or shards. Perhaps if they become diminutive and dusty like sand, they grow very tender and soft and granular and almost loveable. Then pain could slip through me and possibly out of me.”
― Fish in Exile
― Fish in Exile
“Nothing is a potato. Things are what they are. But sometimes things share similarities. Everything has an end. Potatoes, radishes, marigolds. You. Everything. That is one similarity. But the potatoes are also like you in other ways. Either they are eaten, or they grow into something quite different. The ones that do not grow and are not eaten, those rot away.”
― Translation State
― Translation State
“Tyler falls to his side. His body like rags. He begins to cry. A sound like colony collapse.”
― Negative Space
― Negative Space
“Two naked infants face each other like gladiators. Their hearts have been removed from their chests and placed on their thighs. Their right ventricles are sliced, but left open to the air. They look like the curling, rubber rims of two balloons. The children grab hold of each other’s hearts and begin to drink from them. They throw their heads back like old men downing straight bourbon whiskey.”
― Fish in Exile
― Fish in Exile
“Helen is scrutinizing her eyes in a lacquered hand-mirror. She plucks a stray hair from her brow-line with the ruthlessness she always applies to her own body. Even thirty feet away, hovering in the air like an invisible angel, I find this violence unnerving. I realize that I have only been fully at ease with my wife while watching her through the viewfinder of a camera – even within the private space of our various hotel rooms I prefer her seen through a lens, emblematic of my own needs and fantasies rather than existing in her own right. At one time this rightly outraged her, but recently she has begun to play along with my obsession. For hours I watch her, picking her nose and arguing with me about something as I lie on the bed with a camera to my eye, fascinated by the shifting geometries of her thighs and shoulders, the diagrams of her face.”
― The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2
― The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2
David Roden’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at David Roden’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,089 books
|
218 friends
1,090 books
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493 friends
357 books
|
240 friends
321 books
|
200 friends
269 books
|
354 friends
655 books
|
70 friends
2 books
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120 friends
2 books
|
3 friends
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