skopia
Berlin cleaned houses, worked emergency rooms, raised four sons, and drank. Forty-three stories out of that life, Alaska to Mexico City, written so plainly and fast you miss how much is inside them.
Six volumes of one man's life recorded to the last cornflake and cigarette, and at the center a father who drank himself to death, leaving a house his sons had to scrub clean.
Sara Smolinsky's father studies Torah in a Lower East Side tenement while her mother takes in boarders and he marries her sisters to men they dread. She leaves at seventeen for night school.
Turgenev said this was the only work of his that still gave him pleasure. Vladimir, sixteen, loves the princess next door, twenty-one, and her secret lover is nobody he can fight.
György Köves is fourteen when he is taken from Budapest to Auschwitz, and he reports each stage as it arrives, without hindsight. Back home he tries to explain the camps' happiness.
A missing-person notice from December 1941 sends Modiano into Paris archives after Dora Bruder, a Jewish fifteen-year-old who fled her convent school. He recovers her addresses and the date she was deported.
Knoxville, 1915: a man is called out at night to his sick father and killed on the road home. Agee follows the six-year-old son through the days after, in prose of unbearable precision.
Gary's mother told everyone in Vilna that her son would become a French diplomat, a war hero, and a great writer. He became all three, and the debt nearly crushed him.
Crossing the Mekong by ferry in 1929, a French girl of fifteen meets the Chinese man who becomes her lover. Duras writes it in fragments that refuse both romance and pity.
Seventeen days on a motorcycle carry a father and son from Minnesota to California while he works out what Quality means and recovers the man he was before electroshock erased him.
Pessoa invented an assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon and gave him hundreds of fragments on being alive in a rented room. Open the book anywhere and someone is already thinking your thoughts.