"The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005" [.]

[fiefoe]

"Hell-Heaven" / Jhumpa Lahiri
__ My father had a survivor's mentality. From time to time, he liked to remark, in mixed company and often with no relevant provocation, that starving Russians under Stalin had resorted to eating the glue off the back of their wallpaper.
__ the vanishing details of her past

"Catalogue Sales" / Molly McNett

• "You never explicitly stated I couldn't wear them outside," she kept saying, tracing the words explicitly stated on a piece of scratch paper.
• Sometimes when you first look at someone they seem like they might be pretty and then it is a relief to find that they bite their nails, for example. You can think, Well, it's all fine, but it doesn't really count.
• And if you thought about it, he was the one with the money problem. He had the most expensive taste of all: people who liked beautiful things.
  

"Bohemians" / George Saunders
__ She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief.

** "Manifesto - A press release from PRKA" / George Saunders
__ Last Thursday, my organization, People Reluctant To Kill for an Abstraction, orchestrated an overwhelming show of force around the globe.
__ We stand under awnings during urban thunderstorms, moved to thoughtfulness by the troubled, umbrella-tinged faces rushing by.

** "The Joke" / J. David Stevens

• Only the bag of candy seems calm. A few feet from the rest of the group, it discovers its own sentience and repeatedly counts the number of chocolate bars it contains.
• The bag of candy composes, in a difficult Italian meter, an ode in which the river serves as a metaphor for their situation: both movement and stasis.
  
• As the chicken slips downriver in the rowboat, he dreams of the new society that he will form out of the misfits he finds along his way - characters from bad jokes or other jokes never to be told: one-legged midgets, gay hairdressers, most of Poland.
  

"Girls I Know" / Douglas Trevor
__ "'We're knotted together in innocence and guile,"' she said. She had settled on my favorite of all of Lowell's sonnets.
__ When Lowell was playing as a boy on Revere Street in Boston, Bishop was up in Nova Scotia, watching her grandparents grow older still.

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