A bad heart in a hospital bed

"[John] Scalish found his own, quieter exit. A bad heart in a hospital bed. Like men I've known, like men you might have known. Men who worked mundane jobs for so many years that they'd lost track of time altogether. I am not sure what it is that fascinates me about the death of Scalish, or the many people like him—people who live salacious and high-stakes lives, awash with power and control, being forced to surrender to the heart. Not the bullet or the knife or the rope in a prison cell."

~~ from There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

A.P. Balthazar reads “Accident”

A.P. Balthazar reads her poem "Accident" after a print interview in which she cites Sylvia Plath and Charles Baudelaire as influences on her work.

I could barely pay my bills

"And even then, even with the flimsy and barely present political framework of my youth, I realized that I was bad at the job in part because I could barely pay my bills. And I would spend my day trying to contact people who could barely pay their bills. And I was doing this for a paycheck that was only kind of enough. And I'd walk outside on breaks and look at my phone, and I'd have a missed phone call from someone calling me about money I owed. I was bad at my job, in part, because when someone told me they didn't have it, I believed them. Because I also didn't have it. And I didn't care to scrap over the phone about what we both ain't got."

~~ from There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

recovery mission

Late last night, we recovered a few old friends who'd been M.I.A.

Behold T. C. Boyle's East is East, my father's college copy of The Sun Also Rises, and my first copy of A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley. I acquired the Exley while employed at a temporary remainders-only bookstore and "gulped it down," as Rushdie said of Pynchon's Vineland because "it beats getting drunk."

 

They don't throw themselves in the river or jump out of fourth floor windows

"Country people are more inhibited than townspeople that saying openly that somebody has killed himself, and they find it hardest of all to say how. I guessed at once that Joana had hanged herself; in fact, I said to the woman from the general store, Joana hanged herself, didn't she? She was taken aback and simply said Yes. People like Joana hang themselves, I said. They don't throw themselves in the river or jump out of fourth floor windows: they get a piece of rope, deftly tie a noose in it, attach it firmly to a beam, then let themselves drop into the noose. Ballerinas and actresses hang themselves, I told the woman from the general store."

~~ from Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard

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Woodcutters

 

Author Walter Aske considers Woodcutters his favorite novel by Austrian giant Thomas Bernhard, but an excerpt from Correction is what we read in Aske's 4.5. 

Like every parent, she failed us in a thousand ways . . .

"Like every parent she failed us in a thousand ways, some of them barely forgivable, but her attention was a gift, the foundation on which I could grow up without fear of abandonment that had haunted her as a child."

~~ from "Sons and Mothers" by George Packer as printed in The Atlantic, October 2026

Manchester or Leeds

"Manchester has the same problems as Leeds — chavs, filth, pollution . . . litter, shopping centres, graffiti, scum, traffic, kebab, Jihad, beggars, posers, polishers . . . drugs, rape, street violence, vandalism, gangs, but it's also an old, large, strange city; it doesn't feel to have sprung up overnight like Leeds. There are enormous redbrick buildings bearing the plaques of old banks and insurance companies. It all seems very solid and enduring and English to you.

"Engels lived here, as did Marx and Admiral Dönitz (final head of state of the 3rd Reich); Wittgenstein as you later find lived about five minutes' walk from your house, a century ago."

~~ from the memoir 4.5 as included in Walter Aske's Vocations

Sons and Mothers

George Packer's "Sons and Mothers" from The Atlantic's October 2026 print issue is a memoir of growing up in a literary family; from it, I was able to ascertain that writer Ann Packer is the "celebrated novelist" who goes unnamed but is recognized as George's sister. Ann and George's mom taught creative writing at Stanford University and lived for about a century while their father passed before he reached 50.