very long essays

A (very long) essay on political communications, French style

19 October 2011

Posted by Alastair Campbell

18 minute(s) read

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9 responses to “A (very long) essay on political communications, French style”

The ego has landed.

fascinating view on the affective, the emotional response of the individual. Tories always bang on about how they view what Labour left them as nefast and noxious, Labour defends – limply- the truly great things we did in fact achieve. The above text would clearly show both miss the point. On vote pour le futur. Pas pour le passe The presidential focus of this text – On vote pour un homme. Pas pour un parti- may jar greatly with many in this country. T.B was viewed as too much this way by many.

Another masochist ?  It’s truly weird.

The emergence of social media is an interesting development and may, in time, alter the political dynamic. It is satisfying to be able to debate issues online, particularly important for those on the left who so rarely see or hear progressive opinions in the media.

Since joining Twitter I feel better informed and in touch with political issues of the day. Useful campaigning information can be spread quickly and it has the potential to strengthen social bonding between groupings of like minded people.

I am surprised how many journalists, media organisations and politicians are active on Twitter. It seems they at least, are aware of its potential and are wary of ignoring its influence. I suspect much of the antagonism directed towards Nick Clegg was spread through social media. Tenagers don’t generally read newspapers or watch TV news, but they do talk to each other via Facebook.

Let’s hope it will make a difference. Since the collapse of widescale union membership, too many natural Labour supporters don’t hear our political message. Most probably read right wing papers and watch Sky TV. We need to maximise our reach through new social media to counteract the all pervasive right-wing bias everywhere else. 

Norway is an amazing modern country, and how it has used it’s oil and natural resouces for the best of all its people should be a set lesson to any country in the World. Efficiency in it’s extraction, and efficiency in using its resulting wealth. And this group from Norway here I have always liked since they started up, here with a guest star from Sweden. Royksopp and Robyn, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfckrfOYAy4

And well done for having respect from La France, but that personally does not surprise me. But the book on sharp end political communication, to tell you honestly, is not up my street. I am into other things in life, you might have noticed.

Anyway, Alastair, isn’t it about time you thought of becoming an MP? Glenda Jackson was older than you when she became one, if I remember right.

Ah yes, just checked, she was about 56, while you are only, ahem!, 54, but without a couple of oscars…

you total wanks. I know who you are and everything. You are pathetic in trying to be higher. Higher than what, you tell we banging keyboard in your own worlds. Need a keyboard to grow vegetibles? Don’t think so somehow.

Time, ey? Who’ll have it? Raised with praise to die? Parentals withering before eyes, heartbreaking before yourself die.

Life, who’ll have it? asked? Not by many with sense. To see life’s gymnastics performed, buck over a horse yes or no the normed.

More scandanavian, with a 23 windowed VW german Samba minibus, and red riding hood, yes, her and her subliminal hidden story, Grimm from Copenhagen-like, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y54ABqSOScQ

Saw Clarissa Dickson show today – brilliant! Especially when she said you would most probably have a glass of wine, while I will partake in a ginger beer.

Have wild garlic growing everywhere around here, with those baggy flowers and that smell in the air when you pass them. Will have to note them so to dig the bulbs when ready. Gawd knows what garlic strain they be though.

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• FRONT MATTER
• TABLE OF CONTENTS

Lengthy Essay Samples

The lengthy sample essays in the pdf link below showcase writers who, to varying degrees, took chances or simply reached higher. Not only did these writers compose lengthy essays (still within prescribed word-count limits), but in many cases they did something bold with content, form, or personality.

In these samples, length can readily be justified by the fact that these are writers who don’t necessarily fall into “typical” student categories but nevertheless are applying to graduate programs or for scholarships. To be competitive, these writers decided to stand out by telling their stories in a way that they hoped would set them apart from, and above, the crowd. A common thread linking these diverse writers is their obvious confidence that:

• their essays matter to the selection committee, and
• their essays will be both noticeable and noticed.

Overview of Lengthy Essay Samples

Mechanical engineering student sample.

In the first sample essay from mechanical engineering, what stands out immediately are the length and the photographs. In this case, the student was applying for an engineering scholarship, so he was given room to flesh out technical material as well as address issues such as personal motivations one would expect to read in a personal statement. Much of the essay is given to a discussion of his thesis work, which involves the examination of “the propagation of a flame in a small glass tube.” The figures depict the experimental work and represent the success of preliminary thesis results, visually indicating the likely point at which the flame reached detonation.

Liberal Arts Student Sample

The three-page personal statement by the liberal arts student is interesting in that it is often intentionally abstract and a bit philosophical. This student attended a small liberal arts school that promotes a “Think, Evolve, Act” theme to its students, and this student reflects on this theme and embraces it in his own life from the beginning of the essay. In his curriculum, he has taken a course on Gandhi and Nonviolence, studied abroad in Belgium, and self-designed a program of “Peace and Conflict Studies with an emphasis in Technological Revolution.” He has also taken a ten-day service learning trip to Costa Rica, studied at the Institute of Gandhian Studies in India, served part-time as an assistant to a member of the European Parliament, and written a paper entitled “A Knowledge-Based Society and the Digital Divide.” Meanwhile, he plans to graduate with distinction in both of his majors. In jazz terms, this student certainly does seem to have the chops.

Film Student Sample

One way to get a sense of the daring of this personal statement, written by a student who aims to study film at Columbia University, is simply to consider the allusions he makes throughout his statement. With neither apology nor obvious humility, this writer makes references to Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Vigo, Terrence Malick, and David Gordon Green. Further, this writer takes the unusual step of using section headings in his personal statement, including, on his first page “Poetry,” “Plastics,” and “Children.” But no matter how creative this writer is, of course, we must ultimately judge him on his evidenced ability as a filmmaker. In that regard, he showcases his ease with talking about films and directors, posits an analogy about student filmmaking (“directing your own material is like parenting”), and discusses the success of his nineteen-minute senior project, “Burying Dvorak”—a film he promoted by taking a year off after graduation, successfully landing it in more than 20 film festivals. As he closes his essay, he makes a specific pitch for Columbia University, where he hopes to continue “to discover my own voice, my own poetry.”

Biological Science Student Sample

For the lengthy sample essay from the student in biological science, the extensive length and scientific depth are necessary because the student is applying for the highly competitive STAR Fellowship. The STAR (Science to Achieve Results) program offers graduate fellowships through the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), funding several years of study. Given the competitiveness of the process and the EPA’s mission of environmental protection, it is vital that this student presents a viable, environmentally important project in a persuasive, professional manner. To achieve this, the writer successfully approaches the essay as she would a thesis proposal, using science-related section heads, providing original figures and data, focusing heavily on future research goals, and essentially performing a literature review, citing 19 sources ranging from basic textbooks to refereed journals. The result is a powerful essay with scientific depth.

How to Write a Long Essay

How to Write a One Page Essay

Writing an essay as part of a school assignment or a project can be a very tedious task, especially if that essay needs to be long. Even the most confident writers may have no trouble writing a few pages for an assignment but may find it challenging to extend that word count as much as possible. If you're assigned a long essay for one of your classes, there's no reason to worry. With some useful tips at your disposal, you can stretch that essay out without making it sound repetitive or boring the reader with an influx of irrelevant information.

What Is a Long Essay?

A long essay is any essay that tends to be longer than three pages or 3,000 words or more. Of course, the definition of a long essay will differ from one classroom to another, depending on the age and level of the students. And even if you're a college student, you may have some professors who consider a five-page essay to be the average, while another teacher considers five pages to be too much. Therefore, it's important to check with your teacher, though they'll usually clarify this when giving the assignment.

Sometimes, the term "long" applies to how many pages, and sometimes it applies to how many paragraphs or words need to be in the essay. Again, this all depends on your teacher, your school's requirements and the nature of the assignment. Either way, hearing your teacher say that you must write a long essay for your next assignment can certainly cause a lot of stress. The good news is that writing a long essay can be much easier than writing a short essay, especially if you're given some meaningful advice.

Why Would You Be Required to Write a Long Essay?

There are many reasons why teachers would assign a long essay to their students. First of all, writing a long essay is an opportunity for a student to really put his or her writing skills to the test. By the time students get to college, they already have an idea as to how to write a decent paper, but perhaps it's within limits. College professors need to make sure that students are able to write well, because eventually, these students may need to write a thesis or dissertation, and there really is no longer essay than that.

So even though you may think of writing a long essay as a torturous assignment, it's actually a great opportunity to practice a very specific skill that will definitely come in handy in other areas of your life. And, if you build up the right mindset for yourself, writing that long essay shouldn't be any more difficult than any other assignment you've been required to complete.

What Is the Standard Essay Format?

There's a standard essay format understood by most English students around the world. This is how essay writing can be taught in a universal way so that students are successful at writing essays no matter where they're studying. A standard essay format typically includes an introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion. Of course, the older a student gets and the more experience they have in school, their essays will gradually get longer and will need to require more detail and features (for instance, citing sources) in order to meet the requirements set by the teacher.

When you need to write a long essay, you can and should still base your writing off of this standard essay format. The only difference is that instead of having three body paragraphs, you're going to have a lot more in order to reach the word count or page requirement that you need to meet. This isn't as hard as it sounds. Instead of squeezing your main idea into one paragraph, try to add more examples and details to make it longer. Also, try to think of other key points that support your essay's theme that might not be so obvious at first.

Start Ahead of Time

The best way to relieve the stress that comes with having to write a long essay is to start ahead of time. Too many college students (and high school students) wait until the last possible minute to write an essay. Though some students may certainly be able to get away with this, it'll be a lot harder when it comes to writing a longer essay. Therefore, make sure you give yourself plenty of time to complete the assignment. It may work better for some people to do a little bit each day until they reach their goal. For instance, if you're required to write 3,000 words for your long essay, then you may feel better writing just 500 words a day over a couple of days instead of trying to bang it all out at once.

How to Write a 3,000 Word Essay in a Day

Some students rather get the hard work out of the way, instead of letting it drag out over a week. Writing a long essay of 3,000 words can be done in a day if you just put your mind to it. Do the following:

• Don't schedule any other appointments or assignments for the day.
• Put away any potential distractions, like your phone or the TV.
• Stay off of social media.
• Work somewhere quiet, like the library or a calm cafe.
• Take breaks every few paragraphs.
• Set a timer for ten minutes and try to work the entire time without stopping.

Create Your Essay Structure

Once you've decided whether or not you're going to write the essay over a couple of days or in just one day, it's time to start writing the actual essay. Like with any writing assignment, the first thing you should do is create an outline and organize your overall essay structure. If you need to write around five pages, which makes sense for a long essay, then you should make an outline that will support that. Take a look at an essay format example to get an idea of how yours should be:

• Introduction (more than two paragraphs)
• A starter question (something for the reader to consider)
• Body "paragraph/idea" one (four paragraphs on average)
• Body "paragraph/idea" two (four paragraphs on average]
• Body "paragraph/idea" three (four paragraphs on average)
• A conclusion

If you're wondering how on earth you're going to create a body section that's four paragraphs long, try to think of one main idea and three examples that tie together with it. For instance, if your long essay is an argumentative piece about "The Importance of Waiting Until You're Financially Stable to Have Children" you can think of at least four key reasons why:

• You won't have to struggle to pay for their needs.
• You can give them more opportunities.
• You can travel as a family.
• You can put away money for their college tuition.

For the first idea, you can talk about this point in very general terms. Then, you can write three more paragraphs underneath that, with each paragraph discussing a specific example. The second paragraph, for example, can be about paying for things like diapers, clothes, formula, etc., and how much each item costs. The second example can be about paying for things when the child gets a little older, like their food, their school supplies, etc. Lastly, the third example (and the fourth paragraph in this section) can discuss paying for things that the child will need as a teenager, such as more clothes, sports uniforms, dental work, etc.

Did You Answer All the Questions?

After you feel like you've exhausted all examples, but you're still under word count or page count, go back and make sure you've answered all the questions. These questions may have been questions in the rubric or the writing prompt that your teacher provided, or they may be questions that you've thought of on your own. In fact, when you start thinking of what to write about, you should brainstorm some questions that a reader may want to find the answer to about the topic, and you should try to answer these throughout your essay. Creating more potential questions can help you reach your word count faster.

Can You Change Words?

If you're close to reaching your word count but you're still not quite there, then go back and see if you can change any of the language in your essay to make it longer. For example, if you have a lot of contractions in your paper (can't, won't, isn't, they're) go back and make them two words instead of contractions, and do this throughout the entire essay. This is a great solution because it won't take away from the readership of your essay, and while this won't extend the word count too much, it will definitely help a bit.

Think of Additional Details You Can Add

In addition to changing contractions, you can also think of other details you can add to elongate your essay. There are always more examples you can add or more information you can research that will not only resonate with the reader but increase your overall word count or page count.

For example, if you're talking about how parents who decide to have children once they're financially stable will have the opportunity to put more money toward their child's tuition, then you can go back and add plenty of detail supporting this argument. Did you give an example of how much tuition costs? Did you add details about what parents can do with the money if their children decide not to go to college? What about the different types of college funds that exist? These are all details you can add that will increase the length of your essay, while also adding value.

However, when you do this, keep in mind that you want to be very careful not to add too much "fluff." Fluff is when you add information or details that simply aren't valuable to the writing itself. It makes the reader (who in most cases is your teacher and the one grading the assignment) want to skim over your piece, and this can lead to him or her giving you a lower grade.

Edit, Edit, Edit

Last but not least, in order to write a long essay, you must have the capacity to edit your work. Editing not only helps to ensure your paper is long enough, reads well, and is free from grammatical errors, but it will also give you an opportunity to add in more information here and there. To edit, you should always read out loud to yourself, and take a break from your work, so you can revisit it with a fresh pair of eyes. You can easily check if you've reached the length requirements by clicking on "word count" or counting the number of pages yourself, though your document will reveal this as you scroll down.

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Hana LaRock is a freelance content writer from New York, currently living in Mexico. Before becoming a writer, Hana worked as a teacher for several years in the U.S. and around the world. She has her teaching certification in Elementary Education and Special Education, as well as a TESOL certification. Please visit her website, www.hanalarockwriting.com, to learn more.

The Secret(s) to Getting Through Long Papers

By Sophie, a Writing Center Coach

It’s the beginning of the semester—meaning, as a graduate student, it’s time for me to get back into the groove of planning and writing long papers. For me, the hardest part of approaching a paper is coming up with a topic that will stay interesting to me throughout the research and writing process. A good example of this is from the end of last semester, when I found myself dreading the final paper for my archives class. We covered so many interesting topics in the class, it was hard to decide which one to choose.

In my experience, a bad topic can make the writing process feel infinitely longer and more stressful. As I thought about my archives paper, I worried about finding something that I could focus on for 12 pages. So many of the topics in my class felt interwoven, and I was afraid it would be hard to pick out one thread. If I try to start a long paper without planning, I’ll end up staring at the same sentence or paragraph for hours, trying to figure out what I could possibly say next.

So, when I finally had to commit to a topic, I decided to break down the process into a few fun steps. Dividing it up helped take away some of my worries and made the process easier because I only had to do one step at a time. Here’s how I got started:

1) Create a real brainstorming session

First, I decided to meet up with a few of my friends who were also in the class. We went to a coffee shop we all like, and we brought our notes and readings from the class. None of us had a concrete idea about what to write; we just wanted to throw some possibilities out to see how other people would react to them. 

We started by talking about some of the things we found funny or interesting in previous class discussions. As we talked, we found natural points of disagreement and interest. I took notes about points that stuck out to me. At the end of the conversation, I had a document full of questions and arguments that I wanted to explore further.

My friends also thought of topics, but they arrived at their ideas in different ways. One of my friends kept coming back to a short paper she had already written, and by talking about it, she discovered that she had much more to say. Another friend talked about something that he felt was conspicuously missing from our class discussions, so he decided that this paper would be a good opportunity to learn more.

All three of us came out of the session with inspiration and initial feedback. This step reminded me of the value of talking through my ideas, especially since my peers could push me to think more deeply about particular questions. Plus, connecting with my classmates through discussion helped me get excited about writing. 

Alternatively, I know that, for some people, meeting with friends isn’t always effective; there are also other ways to brainstorm. Sometimes, it helps to talk to someone who doesn’t know about the class or topic—like a Writing Center coach ! For others, the note-taking part could be like having a conversation with yourself, which might be all you need. The Writing and Learning Centers also have some great tools for brainstorming if you prefer to work independently.

2) Conduct some initial research

Once I had the beginnings of an idea, I decided to look for sources that could help me narrow my topic. The first place I go to find scholarly articles is the UNC Libraries’ page with “Resource Tools.” At this phase, I like to do keyword searches with Articles+. When you open the advanced search options, you can limit your results to be really specific by choosing a discipline, language, date the material was published, and whether the source needs to be scholarly/peer reviewed. In this case, I used “AND” to limit my results to articles with all of my desired keywords, like: “Sexual material” AND “Archives.” There’s another great article that explains the logic behind this kind of search, which uses Boolean logic.

After I’ve combed through relevant results for one search, I’ll usually adjust my keywords to see if anything new pops up. I’ll also see if the best articles (the ones that feel most related to my topic) have been cited by anyone else and whether those articles have something to offer me. I also repeat this process with Google Scholar and with the “E-research by Discipline” option, which will lead me to specific databases for my field. 

In this case, I used the Information and Library Science option, which took me to the best databases for journals in my discipline. Searching within a discipline allows me to think more carefully about my keywords; I might not have to include “archives,” or “libraries,” for example, because many of the articles are already about archives.

As I’m going along, I like to save any articles that I find in Zotero, a citation manager that I downloaded from the library’s website. Within Zotero, I make a folder for the assignment (“Final Paper”), and it automatically saves all the information I need to quickly go back to the article if I need it. (Note: I first learned about using Zotero from a helpful university librarian, so if you’re new to citation managers, it might be helpful to have a librarian give you a tutorial. You can also read another blog article on using Zotero .)

At the end of this process, I usually have a file full of “maybe” sources that I could come back to later. This helps give me an idea of what people have already said about this topic and where I might be able to add to the conversation.

3) Meet with your professor

After I came up with an idea and did some preliminary research, I thought it would be a good idea to check in with my professor during office hours. Since my professor is an expert in the field, I knew she would have a better sense of the context surrounding my research question. 

(Note: Sometimes I like to go to office hours before I do any research; getting some expertise at the beginning can make the search process even faster. In this case, my professor encouraged us to find what we could before checking in with her.)

Before the meeting, I read through the abstracts of the sources I had already found in my preliminary research (those were saved in my Zotero library). Based on those, I wrote down some questions that I had about the topic. I met with my professor for about 15 minutes, and in that time, I pitched my question and told her what I had already found. She was able to direct me to some additional books and cases to look at, and I wrote those down to research later. 

My professor also encouraged me to post my topic in our class’ Sakai forum. She created a discussion page specifically for final topic ideas so that my other classmates could provide feedback. Often, she said, students with similar topics will find sources that are helpful to each other, so the forum is a good place to share resources. I left the meeting with a strong sense of direction of what I needed to begin the actual writing.

After going through these steps, I felt like I had a good idea of what I wanted to write about and some evidence that could support my argument. Still, because it was such a long paper, I felt like I needed help to get started on the outline and the actual writing process. So, I decided to make a Writing Center Appointment to get my ideas in order and to make a plan for finishing the paper on time. Again, since I’m a person who likes to talk through my ideas, it was helpful to hear another person’s reaction to my topic so far. It also gave me a self-imposed deadline to complete these initial steps.

Breaking down the first few steps of writing my research paper helped me think of it as a list of small tasks to check off instead of one giant, frustrating project. It felt good to accomplish little things that I knew would add up to finishing the whole thing. This process also led me to a topic that really excited and engaged me, so when it was time to do the final step (the actual writing), I was happy to get started.

This blog showcases the perspectives of UNC Chapel Hill community members learning and writing online. If you want to talk to a Writing and Learning Center coach about implementing strategies described in the blog, make an appointment with a writing coach , a peer tutor , or an academic coach today. Have an idea for a blog post about how you are learning and writing remotely? Contact us here .

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How to Write a Long Essay, Term Paper or Research Paper

How To Format a Long Essay

A long essay is an essay longer than 3 pages. This varies with the level of education. Some college instructors will view a five-page essay as short and others as average.

The phrase ‘long essay’ can be used to refer to the number of words, the number of pages, and sometimes the number of paragraphs. Most instructors usually clarify how long essays should be before issuing them.

What Is A Long Essay In Research?

A long essay in research is a ten-page or more essay that analyses, interprets, and compares researched ideas to the ideas of the writer.

Research papers are usually longer than academic essays. They are usually more detailed and test writing and scholarly research skills.

People Also Read: Essay Writing Topics with Answers:21 Examples in English

How to Write Long Essays

Most students complain that it is overwhelming to write long essays. The stress that comes with writing long essays contributes to many students wanting to put them off. Tackling long essays can become easy by following the following steps:

1. Pick a Topic

When granted the freedom to choose a topic, pick a broad and specific one. It is easy to find and write about a broad topic.

Topics with scarce research material generate little content and are not suitable for long essays.

One may likely end up getting stranded halfway into the essay with nothing more to write about on a topic. For example, the effects of Racism in America in the 2000s is a broader topic than the effects of racism in America in 2004.

2. Start your Research

Researching on a long essay can take hours and days. Thorough research is important in the formulation of a thesis. It makes it easy to determine the sources that are more important and valuable to your topic. The more sources you get the better and longer your essay will be.

3. Write a Thesis

The thesis statement is crucial because its shapes your entire essay. The thesis statement you formulate should be specific.

It should outline the main argument that you will try making in the essay. Use the thesis to explain why the question you want to answer is important.

In long essays, thesis statements should appear at the end of the first paragraph or on the second paragraph.

4. Finish your Research

With the thesis statement already established, continue doing research. The research should focus on the points that support the thesis statement you have come up with.

Any point that does not align with the thesis statement is not meant for your essay. All the sources you use for research should help develop your thesis statement. The sources should be credible and authentic to strongly support the thesis.

5. Make an Outline

An outline helps you organize thoughts and plan how you will write your essay. Without outlines, you are likely to get lost in the middle of your essay.

With an outline, writing is easy and fast with an organized flow of ideas. The more detailed your outline is the more ease you will have when writing the essay.

6. Write the Essay

Start writing your essay. Keep your head down and avoid distraction. Read through your writing to make sure that your ideas flow and paragraphs connect.

7. Proofread and Edit

You should read your paper out loud when proofreading.

This helps you notice any grammatical, punctuation, or paraphrasing errors in your essay.

You can choose to edit the errors as you read or write them down and correct them once you are done proofreading.

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How to Balance your Points in a Long Essay

Formulate a thesis.

To balance your points in an essay you first need a thesis statement. A thesis statement will set the tone of how your points will be balanced.

With the thesis, you will be able to understand your essay better. This in turn helps you balance your points.

Write the introduction paragraph

Introduce your essay in the best way possible. Make it clear what you will talk about in your essay. Do not use fancy language that the reader will find hard to understand. At the end of the introduction paragraph write the thesis statement.

Supportive paragraphs

These are paragraphs that make up the body of your essay. They explain all points in your essay. Each point should be represented in its paragraph.

The first sentence of each paragraph is the topic sentence that states the point you will talk about. Explain the points exhaustively as the paragraph progresses.

People Also Read: Linking Words for Essay Writing: Useful Paragraph Phrases

The conclusion summarizes everything you have talked about in the essay. If readers happen to read the conclusion only they should grasp everything about your essay.

If writing a conclusion is hard, you can use your thesis statement as the conclusion because it also presents what your essay is all about.

Tips on How to Format a Long Essay

Instructors give long essays to their students to test their writing skills. An example of such a long task is writing a 4000-word essay that can take someone quite some time. The standard essay format is introduction, body, and conclusion.

The format for long essays includes two introduction paragraphs, 3 ideas in the body with each idea presented in four paragraphs, and a conclusion. This gives the writer the chance to achieve the given length.

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How to Make an Essay Long the Smart Way

Essays can be made long in the following way:

1. Expanding descriptions

Descriptions are very important, especially in descriptive essays.

Even if you have defined them you can add more information to make them more detailed.

2. Enhancing transitions

Transitions not only enable the reader to smoothly navigate through your points but also add length to your essay.

Additionally, great transitions make your essay better and are signs of a great writer.

This is different for short essays. Read more on how to write short essays to know why long transitions may not be included.

3. Expanding paragraphs

Go through your essay and find points that are not explained clearly and explain them clearly.

You can’t know everything about a topic. There will be always relevant information to add to the points of your essay. You can explain the basics if you did not do so and define important terms as well.

4. Adding the Introduction

No rule states that introductions should be short. They should be detailed because they tell the reader what to expect and set the tone for your essay. If you rushed over the introduction revise it and add more ideas to make it detailed and catchier.

5. Make sure that you have Included Everything

Revisit your outline and check whether you have included all the points you wanted to in the essay. If not, add them. Sometimes you may rush when writing the essay and forget to include all the points you intended to.

6. Checking the Assignment Again

Reading the assignment again can help you think of new ideas to include in your essay. This is because you may not have exhausted everything on the topic and reading the assignment again can open up your mind to a new thinking dimension. Also, you may have missed something in the instructions that you should add to the essay.

7. Add Quotations

Quotations help show the reader that you understand what you are writing about. You can bring in two quotes from famous writers to support your arguments. Always remember to cite and reference them to avoid plagiarism.

8. Asking a Friend what is Missing

After doing all of the above and still not achieving the length you want, ask a friend to read your essay. They will help you identify what is missing and unclear in your work. It is not easy receiving constructive criticism in your work but that is one way to make it better.

When not handling complex essays and academic writing tasks, Josh is busy advising students on how to pass assignments. In spare time, he loves playing football or walking with his dog around the park.

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• Writing Tips

How to Make an Essay Longer

• 7-minute read
• 10th May 2023

So you have an essay due the next day. You’ve been holed up in your dorm all day writing it, and now you’ve finished the conclusion. You shake your fist in celebratory fashion as you punctuate the paper’s last sentence. However, your jaw drops in horror when you focus on the word count. The essay rubric states that you must write at least 1,500 words, but you’ve written only 1,000 ! How can this be? You worked so hard to do what the assignment asked you. We know the feeling, and we’re sure every college student experiences it at least once.

So with time running out, you can do the following:

●  Submit the essay and hope the professor doesn’t notice

●  Add some gibberish sentences to get close enough to the required word count

We don’t recommend these options. Making an essay longer seems daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. That’s why we’re providing this post on expanding your essay while keeping it relevant to the topic. We’ll share our helpful tips, and by the end of the post, you’ll know what to do next time your essay falls short of the word count.

1. Add Content to the Essay

Adding more details is a great starting point for increasing the word count. Review your essay and see whether you should have addressed additional points about the topic. Could you include a few more arguments?  

You’ll likely have to review your sources to find additional claims. We understand that you might not want to do this, especially if the clock reads midnight and your class starts in nine hours. However, adding more content not only increases the word count; it also makes your essay more credible. 

If you need to add content, make sure it’s relevant to the topic. Consider the following example:

Personal details about the source’s author are irrelevant. Submitting such details will only earn you the wrath of your professor’s red ink. Let’s try an alternative:

Expanding on the citation with personal insight about screen time adds punch while keeping the discussion relevant. Additional details must move your essay forward the way dialogue and narrative do for a work of fiction.  

2. Add Transitional Sentences and Phrases

Your essay might be short of words because it lacks transitional phrases, so you should add some to the mix. In fact, every academic paper should include a healthy blend of transitional sentences and transitional words/phrases . Not sure what we mean by that? You know words and phrases such as however , moreover , and in addition . 

As with details, transitional phrases help to move the essay forward, so make sure to use them correctly. Let’s take an example from an essay about the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic:

As you can see, the writer uses transitional phrases correctly, adding value and words to the essay. When you use them correctly, transitional sentences and phrases improve the flow of your writing , enhancing readability. Professors expect coherent essays that flow smoothly, so transitional sentences and phrases are mandatory, regardless of word count. 

That being said, it can be easy to overuse linking words, particularly if you’re a non-native writer. Check out this interesting article from Fabio Cerpeloni, who argues that linking words can impact the readability of your text . 

3. Spell Out Words and Numbers

If you have contractions in your essay, such as can’t , won’t , and couldn’t , write them out in full. You shouldn’t use contractions at all in academic writing because they’re considered informal. Although using full versions of words seems to be a miniscule measure, doing so can go a long way to increasing your word count. And as a rule, you can also spell out numbers one through eleven. Again, doing this will help expand your essay.

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To save time switching out your contractions, make sure you’re familiar with Microsoft Word’s find and replace tool .  

4. Add More Examples

Using at least two examples, you should aim to support every argument you present. If you have only one example for an argument, add a couple more. Provide citations to support your claims; otherwise, your professor will question your knowledge. As with details, examples will strengthen your essay. It’s a win–win situation!

If the essay has enough citations but still needs more words, you could try paraphrasing claims from sources. Just be sure to paraphrase effectively . You wouldn’t want to fall into the trap of plagiarism!

5. Review the Introduction and Conclusion

Now that you’ve written the essay, go back to the introduction and the conclusion. You might be able to expand on them and provide extra details. Remember that the introduction serves as a lead-in to the essay. In other words, it captures your readers’ attention and makes them want to keep reading. If your introduction appears weak, add details that will engage the reader properly.

And for the conclusion, provide a takeaway for the reader and offer a call to action. For example, what are the most important things to remember about your essay? The conclusion may lack punch, so add some details to improve it.

6. Expand Your Research on the Topic

The amount of research you’ve done could affect the word count. One way to check this is by reviewing your reference list. It should have at least five sources, so if yours has fewer, you need to do more research. Again, it’s not something you’d like to do in the middle of the night; however, sacrifices must be made if your essay needs more research. We guarantee your professor will notice if you haven’t done enough research. Here’s an extra tip: adding details will be much easier if you’re fully knowledgeable about the topic. Trust us on this!

While making an essay longer may seem daunting, doing so is easier if you’ve adequately researched the topic. The essay likely needs more ideas or examples, so go ahead and add them. Additional details will lend value, improve flow, and make your essay more credible. The most important thing to remember is that any details you add must be relevant. Simply adding fluff will weaken your essay and cost you marks. So never submit an essay with a low word count; your professor will notice! And after all, expanding on an essay is part of mastering essay writing skills .

We recommend not waiting until the last minute to check that your essay meets the required word count. Adding details or doing additional research the night before will only spell trouble. We understand the difficulty of making time when multiple papers are due in the same week. However, college life will test your time management skills like nothing else! Use your time wisely!

1.  Why do essays fall short of the required word count?

This is often due to a lack of details and transitional sentences. Review your essay to see whether it’s missing important examples that can strengthen your claims.

2.  Can I simply add “fluff” to increase the word count?

Anything you add to the essay must be relevant and must add value. Your professor is no fool, after all!

3. I hear proofreading is essential before submitting my essay. Can anyone help me with this?

We suggest our proofreading experts at Proofed! They can check your writing for grammar and punctuation errors and ensure perfect spelling and concision. Consider submitting a 500-word document for free today!

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College Admissions , College Essays

The personal statement might just be the hardest part of your college application. Mostly this is because it has the least guidance and is the most open-ended. One way to understand what colleges are looking for when they ask you to write an essay is to check out the essays of students who already got in—college essays that actually worked. After all, they must be among the most successful of this weird literary genre.

In this article, I'll go through general guidelines for what makes great college essays great. I've also compiled an enormous list of 100+ actual sample college essays from 11 different schools. Finally, I'll break down two of these published college essay examples and explain why and how they work. With links to 177 full essays and essay excerpts , this article is a great resource for learning how to craft your own personal college admissions essay!

What Excellent College Essays Have in Common

Even though in many ways these sample college essays are very different from one other, they do share some traits you should try to emulate as you write your own essay.

Visible Signs of Planning

Building out from a narrow, concrete focus. You'll see a similar structure in many of the essays. The author starts with a very detailed story of an event or description of a person or place. After this sense-heavy imagery, the essay expands out to make a broader point about the author, and connects this very memorable experience to the author's present situation, state of mind, newfound understanding, or maturity level.

Knowing how to tell a story. Some of the experiences in these essays are one-of-a-kind. But most deal with the stuff of everyday life. What sets them apart is the way the author approaches the topic: analyzing it for drama and humor, for its moving qualities, for what it says about the author's world, and for how it connects to the author's emotional life.

Stellar Execution

A killer first sentence. You've heard it before, and you'll hear it again: you have to suck the reader in, and the best place to do that is the first sentence. Great first sentences are punchy. They are like cliffhangers, setting up an exciting scene or an unusual situation with an unclear conclusion, in order to make the reader want to know more. Don't take my word for it—check out these 22 first sentences from Stanford applicants and tell me you don't want to read the rest of those essays to find out what happens!

A lively, individual voice. Writing is for readers. In this case, your reader is an admissions officer who has read thousands of essays before yours and will read thousands after. Your goal? Don't bore your reader. Use interesting descriptions, stay away from clichés, include your own offbeat observations—anything that makes this essay sounds like you and not like anyone else.

Technical correctness. No spelling mistakes, no grammar weirdness, no syntax issues, no punctuation snafus—each of these sample college essays has been formatted and proofread perfectly. If this kind of exactness is not your strong suit, you're in luck! All colleges advise applicants to have their essays looked over several times by parents, teachers, mentors, and anyone else who can spot a comma splice. Your essay must be your own work, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting help polishing it.

And if you need more guidance, connect with PrepScholar's expert admissions consultants . These expert writers know exactly what college admissions committees look for in an admissions essay and chan help you craft an essay that boosts your chances of getting into your dream school.

Check out PrepScholar's Essay Editing and Coaching progra m for more details!

Links to Full College Essay Examples

Some colleges publish a selection of their favorite accepted college essays that worked, and I've put together a selection of over 100 of these.

Common App Essay Samples

Please note that some of these college essay examples may be responding to prompts that are no longer in use. The current Common App prompts are as follows:

1. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story. 2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience? 3. Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome? 4. Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you? 5. Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. 6. Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

7. Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

Now, let's get to the good stuff: the list of 177 college essay examples responding to current and past Common App essay prompts. 

Connecticut college.

• 12 Common Application essays from the classes of 2022-2025

Hamilton College

• 7 Common Application essays from the class of 2026
• 7 Common Application essays from the class of 2022
• 7 Common Application essays from the class of 2018
• 8 Common Application essays from the class of 2012
• 8 Common Application essays from the class of 2007

Johns Hopkins

These essays are answers to past prompts from either the Common Application or the Coalition Application (which Johns Hopkins used to accept).

• 1 Common Application or Coalition Application essay from the class of 2026
• 6 Common Application or Coalition Application essays from the class of 2025
• 6 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2024
• 6 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2023
• 7 Common Application of Universal Application essays from the class of 2022
• 5 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2021
• 7 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2020

Essay Examples Published by Other Websites

• 2 Common Application essays ( 1st essay , 2nd essay ) from applicants admitted to Columbia

Other Sample College Essays

Here is a collection of essays that are college-specific.

Babson College

• 4 essays (and 1 video response) on "Why Babson" from the class of 2020

Emory University

• 5 essay examples ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ) from the class of 2020 along with analysis from Emory admissions staff on why the essays were exceptional
• 5 more recent essay examples ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ) along with analysis from Emory admissions staff on what made these essays stand out

University of Georgia

• 1 “strong essay” sample from 2019
• 1 “strong essay” sample from 2018
• 10 Harvard essays from 2023
• 10 Harvard essays from 2022
• 10 Harvard essays from 2021
• 10 Harvard essays from 2020
• 10 Harvard essays from 2019
• 10 Harvard essays from 2018
• 6 essays from admitted MIT students

Smith College

• 6 "best gift" essays from the class of 2018

Books of College Essays

If you're looking for even more sample college essays, consider purchasing a college essay book. The best of these include dozens of essays that worked and feedback from real admissions officers.

College Essays That Made a Difference —This detailed guide from Princeton Review includes not only successful essays, but also interviews with admissions officers and full student profiles.

50 Successful Harvard Application Essays by the Staff of the Harvard Crimson—A must for anyone aspiring to Harvard .

50 Successful Ivy League Application Essays and 50 Successful Stanford Application Essays by Gen and Kelly Tanabe—For essays from other top schools, check out this venerated series, which is regularly updated with new essays.

Heavenly Essays by Janine W. Robinson—This collection from the popular blogger behind Essay Hell includes a wider range of schools, as well as helpful tips on honing your own essay.

Analyzing Great Common App Essays That Worked

I've picked two essays from the examples collected above to examine in more depth so that you can see exactly what makes a successful college essay work. Full credit for these essays goes to the original authors and the schools that published them.

Example 1: "Breaking Into Cars," by Stephen, Johns Hopkins Class of '19 (Common App Essay, 636 words long)

I had never broken into a car before.

We were in Laredo, having just finished our first day at a Habitat for Humanity work site. The Hotchkiss volunteers had already left, off to enjoy some Texas BBQ, leaving me behind with the college kids to clean up. Not until we were stranded did we realize we were locked out of the van.

Someone picked a coat hanger out of the dumpster, handed it to me, and took a few steps back.

"Can you do that thing with a coat hanger to unlock it?"

"Why me?" I thought.

More out of amusement than optimism, I gave it a try. I slid the hanger into the window's seal like I'd seen on crime shows, and spent a few minutes jiggling the apparatus around the inside of the frame. Suddenly, two things simultaneously clicked. One was the lock on the door. (I actually succeeded in springing it.) The other was the realization that I'd been in this type of situation before. In fact, I'd been born into this type of situation.

My upbringing has numbed me to unpredictability and chaos. With a family of seven, my home was loud, messy, and spottily supervised. My siblings arguing, the dog barking, the phone ringing—all meant my house was functioning normally. My Dad, a retired Navy pilot, was away half the time. When he was home, he had a parenting style something like a drill sergeant. At the age of nine, I learned how to clear burning oil from the surface of water. My Dad considered this a critical life skill—you know, in case my aircraft carrier should ever get torpedoed. "The water's on fire! Clear a hole!" he shouted, tossing me in the lake without warning. While I'm still unconvinced about that particular lesson's practicality, my Dad's overarching message is unequivocally true: much of life is unexpected, and you have to deal with the twists and turns.

Living in my family, days rarely unfolded as planned. A bit overlooked, a little pushed around, I learned to roll with reality, negotiate a quick deal, and give the improbable a try. I don't sweat the small stuff, and I definitely don't expect perfect fairness. So what if our dining room table only has six chairs for seven people? Someone learns the importance of punctuality every night.

But more than punctuality and a special affinity for musical chairs, my family life has taught me to thrive in situations over which I have no power. Growing up, I never controlled my older siblings, but I learned how to thwart their attempts to control me. I forged alliances, and realigned them as necessary. Sometimes, I was the poor, defenseless little brother; sometimes I was the omniscient elder. Different things to different people, as the situation demanded. I learned to adapt.

Back then, these techniques were merely reactions undertaken to ensure my survival. But one day this fall, Dr. Hicks, our Head of School, asked me a question that he hoped all seniors would reflect on throughout the year: "How can I participate in a thing I do not govern, in the company of people I did not choose?"

The question caught me off guard, much like the question posed to me in Laredo. Then, I realized I knew the answer. I knew why the coat hanger had been handed to me.

Growing up as the middle child in my family, I was a vital participant in a thing I did not govern, in the company of people I did not choose. It's family. It's society. And often, it's chaos. You participate by letting go of the small stuff, not expecting order and perfection, and facing the unexpected with confidence, optimism, and preparedness. My family experience taught me to face a serendipitous world with confidence.

What Makes This Essay Tick?

It's very helpful to take writing apart in order to see just how it accomplishes its objectives. Stephen's essay is very effective. Let's find out why!

An Opening Line That Draws You In

In just eight words, we get: scene-setting (he is standing next to a car about to break in), the idea of crossing a boundary (he is maybe about to do an illegal thing for the first time), and a cliffhanger (we are thinking: is he going to get caught? Is he headed for a life of crime? Is he about to be scared straight?).

Great, Detailed Opening Story

More out of amusement than optimism, I gave it a try. I slid the hanger into the window's seal like I'd seen on crime shows, and spent a few minutes jiggling the apparatus around the inside of the frame.

It's the details that really make this small experience come alive. Notice how whenever he can, Stephen uses a more specific, descriptive word in place of a more generic one. The volunteers aren't going to get food or dinner; they're going for "Texas BBQ." The coat hanger comes from "a dumpster." Stephen doesn't just move the coat hanger—he "jiggles" it.

Details also help us visualize the emotions of the people in the scene. The person who hands Stephen the coat hanger isn't just uncomfortable or nervous; he "takes a few steps back"—a description of movement that conveys feelings. Finally, the detail of actual speech makes the scene pop. Instead of writing that the other guy asked him to unlock the van, Stephen has the guy actually say his own words in a way that sounds like a teenager talking.

Turning a Specific Incident Into a Deeper Insight

Suddenly, two things simultaneously clicked. One was the lock on the door. (I actually succeeded in springing it.) The other was the realization that I'd been in this type of situation before. In fact, I'd been born into this type of situation.

Stephen makes the locked car experience a meaningful illustration of how he has learned to be resourceful and ready for anything, and he also makes this turn from the specific to the broad through an elegant play on the two meanings of the word "click."

Using Concrete Examples When Making Abstract Claims

My upbringing has numbed me to unpredictability and chaos. With a family of seven, my home was loud, messy, and spottily supervised. My siblings arguing, the dog barking, the phone ringing—all meant my house was functioning normally.

"Unpredictability and chaos" are very abstract, not easily visualized concepts. They could also mean any number of things—violence, abandonment, poverty, mental instability. By instantly following up with highly finite and unambiguous illustrations like "family of seven" and "siblings arguing, the dog barking, the phone ringing," Stephen grounds the abstraction in something that is easy to picture: a large, noisy family.

Using Small Bits of Humor and Casual Word Choice

My Dad, a retired Navy pilot, was away half the time. When he was home, he had a parenting style something like a drill sergeant. At the age of nine, I learned how to clear burning oil from the surface of water. My Dad considered this a critical life skill—you know, in case my aircraft carrier should ever get torpedoed.

Obviously, knowing how to clean burning oil is not high on the list of things every 9-year-old needs to know. To emphasize this, Stephen uses sarcasm by bringing up a situation that is clearly over-the-top: "in case my aircraft carrier should ever get torpedoed."

The humor also feels relaxed. Part of this is because he introduces it with the colloquial phrase "you know," so it sounds like he is talking to us in person. This approach also diffuses the potential discomfort of the reader with his father's strictness—since he is making jokes about it, clearly he is OK. Notice, though, that this doesn't occur very much in the essay. This helps keep the tone meaningful and serious rather than flippant.

An Ending That Stretches the Insight Into the Future

But one day this fall, Dr. Hicks, our Head of School, asked me a question that he hoped all seniors would reflect on throughout the year: "How can I participate in a thing I do not govern, in the company of people I did not choose?"

The ending of the essay reveals that Stephen's life has been one long preparation for the future. He has emerged from chaos and his dad's approach to parenting as a person who can thrive in a world that he can't control.

This connection of past experience to current maturity and self-knowledge is a key element in all successful personal essays. Colleges are very much looking for mature, self-aware applicants. These are the qualities of successful college students, who will be able to navigate the independence college classes require and the responsibility and quasi-adulthood of college life.

What Could This Essay Do Even Better?

Even the best essays aren't perfect, and even the world's greatest writers will tell you that writing is never "finished"—just "due." So what would we tweak in this essay if we could?

Replace some of the clichéd language. Stephen uses handy phrases like "twists and turns" and "don't sweat the small stuff" as a kind of shorthand for explaining his relationship to chaos and unpredictability. But using too many of these ready-made expressions runs the risk of clouding out your own voice and replacing it with something expected and boring.

Use another example from recent life. Stephen's first example (breaking into the van in Laredo) is a great illustration of being resourceful in an unexpected situation. But his essay also emphasizes that he "learned to adapt" by being "different things to different people." It would be great to see how this plays out outside his family, either in the situation in Laredo or another context.

Example 2: By Renner Kwittken, Tufts Class of '23 (Common App Essay, 645 words long)

My first dream job was to be a pickle truck driver. I saw it in my favorite book, Richard Scarry's "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go," and for some reason, I was absolutely obsessed with the idea of driving a giant pickle. Much to the discontent of my younger sister, I insisted that my parents read us that book as many nights as possible so we could find goldbug, a small little golden bug, on every page. I would imagine the wonderful life I would have: being a pig driving a giant pickle truck across the country, chasing and finding goldbug. I then moved on to wanting to be a Lego Master. Then an architect. Then a surgeon.

Then I discovered a real goldbug: gold nanoparticles that can reprogram macrophages to assist in killing tumors, produce clear images of them without sacrificing the subject, and heat them to obliteration.

Suddenly the destination of my pickle was clear.

I quickly became enveloped by the world of nanomedicine; I scoured articles about liposomes, polymeric micelles, dendrimers, targeting ligands, and self-assembling nanoparticles, all conquering cancer in some exotic way. Completely absorbed, I set out to find a mentor to dive even deeper into these topics. After several rejections, I was immensely grateful to receive an invitation to work alongside Dr. Sangeeta Ray at Johns Hopkins.

In the lab, Dr. Ray encouraged a great amount of autonomy to design and implement my own procedures. I chose to attack a problem that affects the entire field of nanomedicine: nanoparticles consistently fail to translate from animal studies into clinical trials. Jumping off recent literature, I set out to see if a pre-dose of a common chemotherapeutic could enhance nanoparticle delivery in aggressive prostate cancer, creating three novel constructs based on three different linear polymers, each using fluorescent dye (although no gold, sorry goldbug!). Though using radioactive isotopes like Gallium and Yttrium would have been incredible, as a 17-year-old, I unfortunately wasn't allowed in the same room as these radioactive materials (even though I took a Geiger counter to a pair of shoes and found them to be slightly dangerous).

I hadn't expected my hypothesis to work, as the research project would have ideally been led across two full years. Yet while there are still many optimizations and revisions to be done, I was thrilled to find -- with completely new nanoparticles that may one day mean future trials will use particles with the initials "RK-1" -- thatcyclophosphamide did indeed increase nanoparticle delivery to the tumor in a statistically significant way.

A secondary, unexpected research project was living alone in Baltimore, a new city to me, surrounded by people much older than I. Even with moving frequently between hotels, AirBnB's, and students' apartments, I strangely reveled in the freedom I had to enjoy my surroundings and form new friendships with graduate school students from the lab. We explored The Inner Harbor at night, attended a concert together one weekend, and even got to watch the Orioles lose (to nobody's surprise). Ironically, it's through these new friendships I discovered something unexpected: what I truly love is sharing research. Whether in a presentation or in a casual conversation, making others interested in science is perhaps more exciting to me than the research itself. This solidified a new pursuit to angle my love for writing towards illuminating science in ways people can understand, adding value to a society that can certainly benefit from more scientific literacy.

It seems fitting that my goals are still transforming: in Scarry's book, there is not just one goldbug, there is one on every page. With each new experience, I'm learning that it isn't the goldbug itself, but rather the act of searching for the goldbugs that will encourage, shape, and refine my ever-evolving passions. Regardless of the goldbug I seek -- I know my pickle truck has just begun its journey.

Renner takes a somewhat different approach than Stephen, but their essay is just as detailed and engaging. Let's go through some of the strengths of this essay.

One Clear Governing Metaphor

This essay is ultimately about two things: Renner’s dreams and future career goals, and Renner’s philosophy on goal-setting and achieving one’s dreams.

But instead of listing off all the amazing things they’ve done to pursue their dream of working in nanomedicine, Renner tells a powerful, unique story instead. To set up the narrative, Renner opens the essay by connecting their experiences with goal-setting and dream-chasing all the way back to a memorable childhood experience:

This lighthearted–but relevant!--story about the moment when Renner first developed a passion for a specific career (“finding the goldbug”) provides an anchor point for the rest of the essay. As Renner pivots to describing their current dreams and goals–working in nanomedicine–the metaphor of “finding the goldbug” is reflected in Renner’s experiments, rejections, and new discoveries.

Though Renner tells multiple stories about their quest to “find the goldbug,” or, in other words, pursue their passion, each story is connected by a unifying theme; namely, that as we search and grow over time, our goals will transform…and that’s okay! By the end of the essay, Renner uses the metaphor of “finding the goldbug” to reiterate the relevance of the opening story:

While the earlier parts of the essay convey Renner’s core message by showing, the final, concluding paragraph sums up Renner’s insights by telling. By briefly and clearly stating the relevance of the goldbug metaphor to their own philosophy on goals and dreams, Renner demonstrates their creativity, insight, and eagerness to grow and evolve as the journey continues into college.

An Engaging, Individual Voice

This essay uses many techniques that make Renner sound genuine and make the reader feel like we already know them.

Technique #1: humor. Notice Renner's gentle and relaxed humor that lightly mocks their younger self's grand ambitions (this is different from the more sarcastic kind of humor used by Stephen in the first essay—you could never mistake one writer for the other).

My first dream job was to be a pickle truck driver.

I would imagine the wonderful life I would have: being a pig driving a giant pickle truck across the country, chasing and finding goldbug. I then moved on to wanting to be a Lego Master. Then an architect. Then a surgeon.

Renner gives a great example of how to use humor to your advantage in college essays. You don’t want to come off as too self-deprecating or sarcastic, but telling a lightheartedly humorous story about your younger self that also showcases how you’ve grown and changed over time can set the right tone for your entire essay.

Technique #2: intentional, eye-catching structure. The second technique is the way Renner uses a unique structure to bolster the tone and themes of their essay . The structure of your essay can have a major impact on how your ideas come across…so it’s important to give it just as much thought as the content of your essay!

For instance, Renner does a great job of using one-line paragraphs to create dramatic emphasis and to make clear transitions from one phase of the story to the next:

Suddenly the destination of my pickle car was clear.

Not only does the one-liner above signal that Renner is moving into a new phase of the narrative (their nanoparticle research experiences), it also tells the reader that this is a big moment in Renner’s story. It’s clear that Renner made a major discovery that changed the course of their goal pursuit and dream-chasing. Through structure, Renner conveys excitement and entices the reader to keep pushing forward to the next part of the story.

Technique #3: playing with syntax. The third technique is to use sentences of varying length, syntax, and structure. Most of the essay's written in standard English and uses grammatically correct sentences. However, at key moments, Renner emphasizes that the reader needs to sit up and pay attention by switching to short, colloquial, differently punctuated, and sometimes fragmented sentences.

Even with moving frequently between hotels, AirBnB's, and students' apartments, I strangely reveled in the freedom I had to enjoy my surroundings and form new friendships with graduate school students from the lab. We explored The Inner Harbor at night, attended a concert together one weekend, and even got to watch the Orioles lose (to nobody's surprise). Ironically, it's through these new friendships I discovered something unexpected: what I truly love is sharing research.

In the examples above, Renner switches adeptly between long, flowing sentences and quippy, telegraphic ones. At the same time, Renner uses these different sentence lengths intentionally. As they describe their experiences in new places, they use longer sentences to immerse the reader in the sights, smells, and sounds of those experiences. And when it’s time to get a big, key idea across, Renner switches to a short, punchy sentence to stop the reader in their tracks.

The varying syntax and sentence lengths pull the reader into the narrative and set up crucial “aha” moments when it’s most important…which is a surefire way to make any college essay stand out.

Renner's essay is very strong, but there are still a few little things that could be improved.

Connecting the research experiences to the theme of “finding the goldbug.”  The essay begins and ends with Renner’s connection to the idea of “finding the goldbug.” And while this metaphor is deftly tied into the essay’s intro and conclusion, it isn’t entirely clear what Renner’s big findings were during the research experiences that are described in the middle of the essay. It would be great to add a sentence or two stating what Renner’s big takeaways (or “goldbugs”) were from these experiences, which add more cohesion to the essay as a whole.

Give more details about discovering the world of nanomedicine. It makes sense that Renner wants to get into the details of their big research experiences as quickly as possible. After all, these are the details that show Renner’s dedication to nanomedicine! But a smoother transition from the opening pickle car/goldbug story to Renner’s “real goldbug” of nanoparticles would help the reader understand why nanoparticles became Renner’s goldbug. Finding out why Renner is so motivated to study nanomedicine–and perhaps what put them on to this field of study–would help readers fully understand why Renner chose this path in the first place.

4 Essential Tips for Writing Your Own Essay

How can you use this discussion to better your own college essay? Here are some suggestions for ways to use this resource effectively.

#1: Get Help From the Experts

Getting your college applications together takes a lot of work and can be pretty intimidatin g. Essays are even more important than ever now that admissions processes are changing and schools are going test-optional and removing diversity standards thanks to new Supreme Court rulings .  If you want certified expert help that really makes a difference, get started with  PrepScholar’s Essay Editing and Coaching program. Our program can help you put together an incredible essay from idea to completion so that your application stands out from the crowd. We've helped students get into the best colleges in the United States, including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.  If you're ready to take the next step and boost your odds of getting into your dream school, connect with our experts today .

#2: Read Other Essays to Get Ideas for Your Own

As you go through the essays we've compiled for you above, ask yourself the following questions:

• Can you explain to yourself (or someone else!) why the opening sentence works well?
• Look for the essay's detailed personal anecdote. What senses is the author describing? Can you easily picture the scene in your mind's eye?
• Find the place where this anecdote bridges into a larger insight about the author. How does the essay connect the two? How does the anecdote work as an example of the author's characteristic, trait, or skill?
• Check out the essay's tone. If it's funny, can you find the places where the humor comes from? If it's sad and moving, can you find the imagery and description of feelings that make you moved? If it's serious, can you see how word choice adds to this tone?

Make a note whenever you find an essay or part of an essay that you think was particularly well-written, and think about what you like about it . Is it funny? Does it help you really get to know the writer? Does it show what makes the writer unique? Once you have your list, keep it next to you while writing your essay to remind yourself to try and use those same techniques in your own essay.

#3: Find Your "A-Ha!" Moment

All of these essays rely on connecting with the reader through a heartfelt, highly descriptive scene from the author's life. It can either be very dramatic (did you survive a plane crash?) or it can be completely mundane (did you finally beat your dad at Scrabble?). Either way, it should be personal and revealing about you, your personality, and the way you are now that you are entering the adult world.

Check out essays by authors like John Jeremiah Sullivan , Leslie Jamison , Hanif Abdurraqib , and Esmé Weijun Wang to get more examples of how to craft a compelling personal narrative.

#4: Start Early, Revise Often

Let me level with you: the best writing isn't writing at all. It's rewriting. And in order to have time to rewrite, you have to start way before the application deadline. My advice is to write your first draft at least two months before your applications are due.

Let it sit for a few days untouched. Then come back to it with fresh eyes and think critically about what you've written. What's extra? What's missing? What is in the wrong place? What doesn't make sense? Don't be afraid to take it apart and rearrange sections. Do this several times over, and your essay will be much better for it!

For more editing tips, check out a style guide like Dreyer's English or Eats, Shoots & Leaves .

What's Next?

Still not sure which colleges you want to apply to? Our experts will show you how to make a college list that will help you choose a college that's right for you.

Interested in learning more about college essays? Check out our detailed breakdown of exactly how personal statements work in an application , some suggestions on what to avoid when writing your essay , and our guide to writing about your extracurricular activities .

Working on the rest of your application? Read what admissions officers wish applicants knew before applying .

The recommendations in this post are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links PrepScholar may receive a commission.

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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Home / Guides / Writing Guides / Writing Tips / How to Make an Essay Longer the Smart Way

How to Make an Essay Longer the Smart Way

Meeting an essay’s required page or word count can sometimes be a struggle, especially if you’re juggling multiple papers or exams. In a pinch, students often rely on tricks like increasing margin size or making their font slightly bigger. Though these tricks do increase page length, there are easier (and smarter) ways to write a longer, high-quality essay. Making a paper meet minimum word or page counts doesn’t have to be an agonizing process—you can add length while also adding clarity and depth.

Here are 10 tips on how you can write a longer and a smarter essay, even if the deadline is fast approaching:

Tip #1: Look Back at Your Prompt/Rubric/etc.

If you’ve been provided a comprehensive prompt or rubric for an essay, read it, and read it again. Think about the following:

• Did you answer all of the questions in the prompt?
• Did you provide supporting evidence to back up whatever claims you made?
• Did you leave out any information that might increase the reader’s understanding of your argument?
• Did you meet all requirements (besides length) for the paper?

If the answer isn’t a decisive “yes” to every question on this list, go back and revise.

Tip #2: Go Back Through Your Introduction and Conclusion

Often times, ideas evolve while writing a paper. If the first thing you wrote was the introduction, go back and reread the first paragraph. You might decide that you left out key information that aids the reader in understanding your argument. When looking back on the conclusion, make sure you’ve both summarized the main points within the essay and provided your reader with a solution to consider. If you don’t feel you’ve done this, go back through and revise the paper.

Tip #3: Have Someone Proofread Your Essay

Even if you’re short on time ask a friend, sibling, or parent to read through your paper, specifically noting any points they find confusing. Then, go back and revise the parts that were unclear, adding in more information to provide readers with further clarity. You have a more comprehensive understanding of what you’re writing about than your reader, so having someone else look over your paper can be a helpful way to ensure that you haven’t missed any important details.

Tip #4: Use Quotations

Chances are, you have already used quotes in your paper. Quotations are a great way to enhance your argument while also driving up a paper’s word count, but don’t add quotes just for the sake of doing so. If you’re short on words, read through your source materials again to see if you’ve missed any valuable quotes. You can also do a little more research to see if there are any other sources you can add to provide the reader with more evidence toward your argument. Longer quotes aren’t necessarily better, but if you’re really in a bind, you might want to lengthen some of the quotes that are already included.

Tip #5: Review Your Outline

Did you make an outline to plan the essay when you first started? Go back through that initial outline and make sure you’ve hit all of your intended points. It’s possible that you’ve left out an important piece of your argument that would both increase page count and make for a better essay.

Tip #6: Include More Transitional Phrases

Graders often look for traditional words linking sentences to each other, like “therefore,” “even though”, and “on the other hand.” Read through your essay and make sure the sentences flow smoothly into each other. If they don’t, go back and add in transitional phrases like the ones listed above. Your writing will be easier to read, and you’ll get closer to the minimum page requirement in the process.

Tip #7: Read Your Paper Out Loud

This might sound like a silly tip, but when you read your paper out loud, you become increasingly aware of any grammatical or syntactical issues. When you rephrase sentences to fix these, you might end up increasing the paper length a bit. In the process of reading out loud, you also might realize that you didn’t include sufficient details within a particular paragraph. If that’s the case, go back in and add more to increase length.

Tip #8: Take a Break From Your Essay

You’ve probably been staring at your computer screen for hours, hoping words will magically pop into your head. Take a break. Eat a snack, go for a walk, or talk to a friend on the phone. You’ll come back to the essay with a fresh perspective after some time away, and you might have new ideas after you’ve had time away from your paper.

Tip #9: Ask Your Instructor for Help

Most teachers, teaching assistants, and professors are willing to look over papers for students before the final submission date. If there is still time, ask if you can make an appointment to go over your paper or head over to office hours. Your instructor might offer tips on how to better answer the prompt, and this in turn may also increase the word count of the paper.

Tip #10: Use multiple examples to back up your argument

If you’ve only used one source or anecdote to explain a given point, find a second source to provide additional evidence for the reader. This method will help drive up a paper’s word count while also providing further support for your argument.

Although hitting a minimum page count can sometimes be challenging, you can do it the smart way by increasing the information you provide to the reader—there’s no reason to resort to tricks like increasing line spacing or font size. If you’re really in a bind at the last minute, you might want to break up some of your paragraphs. This increases length while also making text more manageable for a reader. But after going through the tips on this list, your paper should be adequate in length without you having to even consider spacing.

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Very Long Sentences: How to Write and Make Them Shorter (with Examples in English)

Using complex sentences in your writing is fine, but too many very long sentences can be exhausting for your reader. If you have too many very long sentences in your writing, your reader will struggle to remember what you're trying to say and to engage with your ideas. Break your very long sentences into shorter sentences to help your reader.

You can shorten long sentences by:

1. Separating independent clauses Look for conjunctions like "and" in your sentences and see if the part after the "and" could be written as an individual sentence.

2. Eliminating extra clauses Remove sentence starts such as "in my opinion", "as a matter of fact", "as far as I am concerned". They add nothing to your sentence.

3. Cutting out glue words Glue words are the 200 or so most common words in the English language. They're grammatically correct, but often make your sentences unnecessarily long.

4. Look for repetition and redundancy Have you called something a "true fact"? Find places where you've repeated the same idea three times or used unnecessary words that you can easily remove.

How to Cut Glue Words from Your Sentences

In every sentence, there are "working" words and "glue" words. Working words are words that are essential to the meaning of your sentence. Think subjects, verbs, objects. Glue words, on the other hand, are words that hold your sentence together and help it make sense. They're not necessary to convey your meaning—if you rewrite your sentence without glue words and have the same working words, it will still make sense.

Very long sentences are often overstuffed with glue words. These extra words make the sentence difficult to read and needlessly complex. If you reduce the number of glue words in your sentences, you can make your sentences shorter and easier to understand.

Here's an example of a sentence with a lot of glue words:

• It doesn't matter what kind of coffee I buy, where it's from, or if it's organic or not, I need to have cream because I really don't like how the bitterness makes me feel.

This sentence is long and complicated. There are lots of extra words and thoughts in it. Here's what it looks like rewritten:

• I add cream to my coffee because the bitter taste makes me feel unwell.

This second sentence says exactly the same thing (that the narrator adds cream to their coffee to get rid of the bitter taste) but it does so in half the words, making it clearer and easier for the reader to understand. If you have very long sentences, try rewriting them to remove glue words.

Common Questions about Very Long Sentences: How to Write and Make Them Shorter (with Examples in English)

Why you should avoid very long sentences, learn more about sentence length:, your personal writing coach.

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September 15, 2021

2021-2022 Prize for the Longest College Essays

It’s that time of year. Awards season. And while Emmys will be given out this weekend, we’d like to give out another award: the prize for the longest college essays of the 2021-2022 college admissions season. So which university takes home the grand prize? Is it the University of Chicago with their two long essays? Stanford University with their three somewhat long essays and then laundry list of short answers? Columbia University with their two fairly long essays and super long lists, some of which happen to be shorter than in years past? No, no. None of these schools have claimed the 2021-2022 grand prize for the longest college essays among elite universities.

Tulane University Asks the Longest Essay Prompts

The grand prize goes to…drum roll please…Tulane University. That’s right. Tulane University, which historically has presented applicants with a long supplement in the past , outdoes itself this year. This year, the school asks applicants to respond to two 800-word essays and one 250-word essays. We can’t think of any other elite university that asks applicants to respond in up to 800 words — unless the school doesn’t specify a word count. And to ask two 800-word essays and a 250-word essay? Well, who can accuse Tulane of trying to bump up its US News & World Report ranking by making it easier for students to apply? The school is making them jump through quite the hoop when it comes to its essays.

Tulane University Asks 3 Essay Prompts, Including Two 800-Word Essays

And what exactly are the Tulane essay prompts, you ask? The first prompt reads, “Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences.” Applicants are asked to respond in 250 words. And while the essay is “optional,” loyal readers of our college admissions blog know all too well that “optional” means diddly-squat in elite college admissions. The second prompt reads, “Please describe why you are interested in attending Tulane University.” This essay, too, is optional and applicants are given 800 words to respond. And the third essay reads, “Tulane values the lessons gained from pursuing an education alongside a student body that represents a wide range of experiences and perspectives and is reflective of our multicultural world. If you would like to share a perspective related to your family, cultural group, sexual or gender identity, religious group, or some other aspect that has shaped your identity, please do so here.” This essay, like the other two, is also optional. Applicants are given 800 words to respond just like for the second prompt.

Congratulations to Tulane University for winning the 2021-2022 grand prize for longest college essays!

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65 Long Sentences in Literature

Almost all of the really long sentences are under 1,000 words. The six longest sentences (1,000+ words) are mostly a curiosity, just to see what is possible.

I hope students of writing can study these sentences to find inspiration. My advice on how to learn from them? Try these three practices:

1. Copy them exactly 2. Take them apart, analyze each part, and see how the engine works 3. Ape their form with different content

I also hope this list might be helpful for teachers and professors of writing, who want more lengthy sentence examples to show their students. If you want to teach short sentences, I’ve also compiled a list of those.

The longest sentence in English is also awesome. The longest sentence award goes to:

• Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club , 13,955 word sentence
• And for a runner-up: James Joyce, Ulysses, 4,391 word sentence

And there are even  one-sentence books  — actually, a few of them. But I’m not reposting an entire book.

And let’s end all this nonsense about how long sentences = run-on sentences. You can have a six-word run-on sentence (“I went shopping I ate donuts.”), while most of the sentences below are much, much longer than that and are not run-ons (except for a few examples like Jose Saramago).  But whether the sentence is grammatically correct isn’t nearly as important as whether the sentence is fun or beautiful.

I hope that a study of very long sentences will arm you with strategies that are almost as diverse as the sentences themselves, such as: starting each clause with the same word, tilting with dependent clauses toward a revelation at the end, padding with parentheticals, showing great latitude toward standard punctuation, rabbit-trailing away from the initial subject, encapsulating an entire life, and lastly, as this sentence is, celebrating the list.

What’s the definition of a long sentence? For my purposes, I’m defining it as more than a 100 words. I’ve cheated with a few beautiful sentences a few words short, because there is no sense in having an absolute and arbitrary rule, but more than 100 words was my guiding principle. I think any sentence more than 100 words is almost guaranteed to be complex, complicated, and enormous.

If you like this list, please check out this other writing resource at Bookfox:

• 17 Fantastic Examples of Sentence Repetitions

As far as improving the list, I’d love to make it more diverse . If you have suggestions of 100+ word sentences from the type of authors who aren’t represented here, I would love if you could post your example in the comments, or at least direct me to where I could find it.

Also, if you have a sentence that you love from a particular author, and you think it’s a better sentence than the one I’ve quoted, please, by all means, let’s have the sentences do battle! Post it and we’ll see whether it’s better.

And also, if you’re studying sentences, you probably would like advice on how to write a book. 

In which case you should definitely read my post on the best advice on how to write your novel.

As an editor, I’ve helped hundreds of writers start and finish their stories, so please learn from all that experience.

Long Sentence Examples in Literature

Vladimir nabokov, “the gift.” 96 words..

“As he crossed toward the pharmacy at the corner he involuntarily turned his head because of a burst of light that had ricocheted from his temple, and saw, with that quick smile with which we greet a rainbow or a rose, a blindingly white parallelogram of sky being unloaded from the van—a dresser with mirrors across which, as across a cinema screen, passed a flawlessly clear reflection of boughs sliding and swaying not arboreally, but with a human vacillation, produced by the nature of those who were carrying this sky, these boughs, this gliding façade.”

Jose Saramago, “Blindness.” 97 words. 

“On offering to help the blind man, the man who then stole his car, had not, at that precise moment, had any evil intention, quite the contrary, what he did was nothing more than obey those feelings of generosity and altruism which, as everyone knows, are the two best traits of human nature and to be found in much more hardened criminals than this one, a simple car-thief without any hope of advancing in his profession, exploited by the real owners of this enterprise, for it is they who take advantage of the needs of the poor.”

Vladimir Nabokov, “Lolita.” 99 words.

“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.”

Laurence Sterne, “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.” 107 words.

“The French are certainly misunderstood: — but whether the fault is theirs, in not sufficiently explaining themselves, or speaking with that exact limitation and precision which one would expect on a point of such importance, and which, moreover, is so likely to be contested by us — or whether the fault may not be altogether on our side, in not understanding their language always so critically as to know “what they would be at” — I shall not decide; but ‘tis evident to me, when they affirm, “That they who have seen Paris, have seen every thing,” they must mean to speak of those who have seen it by day-light.”

E.B. White, “Stuart Little.” 107 words.

“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.”

W.G. Sebald, “The Rings of Saturn.” 107 words.

“All I know is that I stood spellbound in his high-ceilinged studio room, with its north-facing windows in front of the heavy mahogany bureau at which Michael said he no longer worked because the room was so cold, even in midsummer; and that, while we talked of the difficulty of heating old houses, a strange feeling came upon me, as if it were not he who had abandoned that place of work but I, as if the spectacles cases, letters and writing materials that had evidently lain untouched for months in the soft north light had once been my spectacle cases, my letters and my writing materials.”

Saul Bellow, “The Adventures of Augie March.” 110 words.

“But it was the figure you cut as an employee, on an employee’s footing with the girls, in work clothes, and being of that tin-tough, creaking, jazzy bazaar of hardware, glassware, chocolate, chicken-feed, jewelry, drygoods, oilcloth, and song hits—that was the big thing; and even being the Atlases of it, under the floor, hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds, with the fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the rumble descending from the trolleys on Chicago Avenue—the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-borne ash, and blackened forms of five-storey buildings rising up to a blind Northern dimness from the Christmas blaze of shops.”

Margaret Atwood, “The Handmaid’s Tale.” 111 words.

“She’s too young, it’s too late, we come apart, my arms are held, and the edges go dark and nothing is left but a little window, a very little window, like the wrong end of a telescope, like the window on a Christmas card, an old one, night and ice outside, and within a candle, a shining tree, a family, I can hear the bells even, sleigh bells, from the radio, old music, but through this window I can see, small but very clear, I can see her, going away from me, through the trees which are already turning, red and yellow, holding out her arms to me, being carried away.”

Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway.” 116 words.

“It was not to them (not to Hugh, or Richard, or even to devoted Miss Brush) the liberator of the pent egotism, which is a strong martial woman, well nourished, well descended, of direct impulses, downright feelings, and little introspective power (broad and simple–why could not every one be broad and simple? she asked) feels rise within her, once youth is past, and must eject upon some object–it may be Emigration, it may be Emancipation; but whatever it be, this object round which the essence of her soul is daily secreted, becomes inevitably prismatic, lustrous, half looking glass, half precious stone; now carefully hidden in case people should sneer at it; now proudly displayed.”

William Faulkner, “That Evening Sun.” 118 words.

The streets are paved now, and the telephone and electric companies are cutting down more and more of the shade trees–the water oaks, the maples and locusts and elms–to make room for iron poles bearing clusters of bloated and ghostly and bloodless grapes, and we have a city laundry which makes the rounds on Monday morning, gathering the bundles of clothes into bright-colored, specially-made motor cars: the soiled wearing of a whole week now flees apparitionlike behind alert and irritable electric horns, with a long diminishing noise of rubber and asphalt like tearing silk, and even the Negro women who still take in white people’s washing after the old custom, fetch and deliver it in automobiles.

Jane Austen, “Northanger Abbey.” 119 words.

“Her plan for the morning thus settled, she sat quietly down to her book after breakfast, resolving to remain in the same place and the same employment till the clock struck one; and from habitude very little incommoded by the remarks and ejaculations of Mrs. Allen, whose vacancy of mind and incapacity for thinking were such, that as she never talked a great deal, so she could never be entirely silent; and, therefore, while she sat at her work, if she lost her needle or broke her thread, if she heard a carriage in the street, or saw a speck upon her gown, she must observe it aloud, whether there were anyone at leisure to answer her or not.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Autumn of the Patriarch.” 121 words.

“She had said I’m tired of begging God to overthrow my son, because all this business of living in the presidential palace is like having the lights on all the time, sir, and she had said it with the same naturalness with which on one national holiday she had made her way through the guard of honor with a basket of empty bottles and reached the presidential limousine that was leading the parade of celebration in an uproar of ovations and martial music and storms of flowers and she shoved the basket through the window and shouted to her son that since you’ll be passing right by take advantage and return these bottles to the store on the corner, poor mother.”

Denis Johnson, “Dirty Wedding.” 121 words.

“I liked to sit up front and ride the fast ones all day long, I liked it when they brushed right up against the buildings north of the Loop and I especially liked it when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little farther north in which people (through windows you’d see a person in his dirty naked kitchen spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor, watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in turn erased by a—wham, the noise and dark dropped down around your head—tunnel) actually lived.”

William Faulkner, “Absolom, Absolom.” 122 words.

“From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that–a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Qunetin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.”

Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina.” 123 Words.

“It is true that Alexei Alexandrovich vaguely sensed the levity and erroneousness of this notion of his faith, and he knew that when, without any thought that his forgiveness was the effect of a higher power, he had given himself to his spontaneous feeling, he had experienced greater happiness than when he thought every minute, as he did now, that Christ lived in his soul, and that by signing papers he was fulfilling His will, but it was necessary for him to think that way, it was so necessary for him in his humiliation to possess at least an invented loftiness from which he, despised by everyone, could despise others, that he clung to his imaginary salvation as if it were salvation indeed.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Brothers Karamazov.” 125 words.

“And this Fyodor Pavlovich began to exploit; that is, he fobbed him off with small sums, with short-term handouts, until, after four years, Mitya, having run out of patience, came to our town a second time to finish his affairs with his parent, when it suddenly turned out, to his great amazement, that he already had precisely nothing, that it was impossible even to get an accounting, that he had already received the whole value of his property in cash from Fyodor Pavlovich and might even be in debt to him, that in terms of such and such deals that he himself had freely entered into on such and such dates, he had no right to demand anything more, and so on and so forth.”

Orhan Pamuk, “My Name is Red.” 127 words.

“We were two men in love with the same woman; he was in front of me and completely unaware of my presence as we walked through the turning and twisting streets of Istanbul, climbing and descending, we traveled like brethren through deserted streets given over to battling packs of stray dogs, passed burnt ruins where jinns loitered, mosque courtyards where angels reclined on domes to sleep, beside cypress trees murmuring to the souls of the dead, beyond the edges of snow-covered cemeteries crowded with ghosts, just out of sight of brigands strangling their victims, passed endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leather works and stone walls; and as we made ground, I felt I wasn’t following him at all, but rather, that I was imitating him.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Jazz Age.” 127 words.

“Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn’t want to know said ‘Yes, we have no bananas’, and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.”

Tom Wolfe, “A Sunday Kind of Love.” 128 words.

“All round them, ten, scores, it seems like hundreds, of faces and bodies are perspiring, trooping and bellying up the stairs with arterio-sclerotic grimaces past a showcase full of such novel items as Joy Buzzers, Squirting Nickels, Finger Rats, Scary Tarantulas and spoons with realistic dead flies on them, past Fred’s barbershop, which is just off the landing and has glossy photographs of young men with the kind of baroque haircuts one can get in there, and up onto 50 th Street into a madhouse of traffic and shops with weird lingerie and gray hair-dyeing displays in the windows, signs for free teacup readings and a pool-playing match between the Playboy Bunnies and Downey’s Showgirls, and then everybody pounds on toward the Time-Life Building, the Brill Building or NBC.”

E.L. Doctorow, “Homer and Langely.” 135 words.

“The houses over to Central Park West went first, they got darker as if dissolving into the dark sky until I couldn’t make them out, and then the trees began to lose their shape, and finally, this was toward the end of the season, maybe it was late February of that very cold winter, and all I could see were these phantom shapes of the white ice, that last light, went gray and then altogether black, and then all my sight was gone though I could hear clearly the scoot scut of the blades on ice, a very satisfying sound, a soft sound though full of intention, a deeper tone that you’d expect made by the skate blades, perhaps for having sounded the resonant basso of the water under the ice, scoot scut, scoot scut.”

Victor Hugo, “Les Miserables.” 136 words.

“While the men made bullets and the women lint, while a large saucepan of melted brass and lead, destined to the bullet-mould smoked over a glowing brazier, while the sentinels watched, weapon in hand, on the barricade, while Enjolras, whom it was impossible to divert, kept an eye on the sentinels, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and some others, sought each other out and united as in the most peaceful of days of their conversations in their student life, and, in one corner of this wine-shop which had been converted into a casement, a couple of paces distant from the redoubt which they had built, with their carbines loaded and primed resting against the backs of their chairs, these fine young fellows, so close to a supreme hour, began to recite love verses.”

Annie Proulx, “Close Range.” 142 words.

“But Pake knew a hundred dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and slope country, in and out of the tiger shits, over the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground, through small-town traffic and stock on the road, band of horses in morning fog, two redheaded cowboys moving a house that filled the roadway and Pake busting around and into the ditch to get past, leaving junkyards and Mexican cafes behind, turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep.”

Philip Roth, “The Plot Against America.” 142 words.

“Elizabeth, New Jersey, when my mother was being raised there in a flat over her father’s grocery store, was an industrial port a quarter the size of Newark, dominated by the Irish working class and their politicians and the tightly knit parish life that revolved around the town’s many churches, and though I never heard her complain of having been pointedly ill-treated in Elizabeth as a girl, it was not until she married and moved to Newark’s new Jewish neighborhood that she discovered the confidence that led her to become first a PTA “grade mother,” then a PTA vice president in charge of establishing a Kindergarten Mothers’ Club, and finally the PTA president, who, after attending a conference in Trenton on infantile paralysis, proposed an annual March of Dimes dance on January 30 – President Roosevelt’s birthday – that was accepted by most schools.”

Jonathan Franzen, “The Corrections.” 148 words.

“He had time for one subversive thought about his parents’ Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags – either Nordic Pleasurelines sent bags like these to every booker of its cruises as a cynical means of getting inexpensive walk-about publicity or as a practical means of tagging the cruise participants for greater ease of handling at embarkation points or as a benign means of building espirit de corps; or else Enid and Alfred had deliberately saved the bags from some previous Nordic Pleasurelines cruise, and, out a misguided sense of loyalty, had chosen to carry them on their upcoming cruise as well; and in either case Chip was appalled by his parents’ willingness to make themselves vectors of corporate advertising – before he shouldered the bags himself and assumed the burden of seeing LaGuardia Airport and New York City and his life and clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents.”

Evelyn Waugh, “Scoop.” 150 words.

“The Francmason weighed anchor, swung about, and steamed into the ochre hills, through the straits and out into the open sea while Corker recounted the heroic legends of Fleet Street; he told of the classic scoops and hoaxes; of the confessions wrung from hysterical suspects; of the innuendo and intricate misrepresentations, the luscious, detailed inventions that composed contemporary history; of the positive, daring lies that got a chap a rise of screw; how Wenlock Jakes, highest paid journalist of the United States, scooped the world with an eye-witness story of the sinking of the Lusitania four hours before she was hit; how [Sir Jocelyn] Hitchcock, the English Jakes, straddling over his desk in London, had chronicled day by day the horrors of the Messina earthquake; how Corker himself, not three months back, had had the good fortune to encounter a knight’s widow trapped by the foot between lift and landing.”

John Updike, “Rabbit, Run.” 163 words.

“But then they were married (she felt awful about being pregnant before but Harry had been talking about marriage for a while and anyway laughed when she told him in early February about missing her period and said Great she was terribly frightened and he said Great and lifted her put his arms around under her bottom and lifted her like you would a child he could be so wonderful when you didn’t expect it in a way it seemed important that you didn’t expect it there was so much nice in him she couldn’t explain to anybody she had been so frightened about being pregnant and he made her be proud) they were married after her missing her second period in March and she was still little clumsy dark-complected Janice Springer and her husband was a conceited lunk who wasn’t good for anything in the world Daddy said and the feeling of being alone would melt a little with a little drink.”

Henry James, “The Golden Bowl.” 165 words.

“She had got up with these last words; she stood there before him with that particular suggestion in her aspect to which even the long habit of their life together had not closed his sense, kept sharp, year after year, by the collation of types and signs, the comparison of fine object with fine object, of one degree of finish, of one form of the exquisite with another–the appearance of some slight, slim draped “antique” of Vatican or Capitoline halls, late and refined, rare as a note and immortal as a link, set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps forsaken after centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity, of the statue; the blurred, absent eyes, the smoothed, elegant, nameless head, the impersonal flit of a creature lost in an alien age and passing as an image in worn relief round and round a precious vase.”

Salman Rushdie, “The Satanic Verses.” 165 words.

“But at the time he had no doubt; what had taken him over was the will to live, unadulterated, irresistible, pure, and the first thing it did was to inform him that it wanted nothing to do with his pathetic personality, that half-reconstructed affair of mimicry and voices, it intended to bypass all that, and he found himself surrendering to it, yes, go on, as if he were a bystander in his own mind, in his own body, because it began in the very centre of his body and spread outwards, turning his blood to iron, changing his flesh to steel, except that it also felt like a fist that enveloped him from outside, holding him in a way that was both unbearably tight and intolerably gentle; until finally it had conquered him totally and could work his mouth, his fingers, whatever it chose, and once it was sure of its dominion it spread outward from his body and grabbed Gibreel Farishta by the balls.”

Jane Austen, “Emma.” 180 words.

“The charming Augusta Hawkins, in addition to all the usual advantages of perfect beauty and merit, was in possession of an independent fortune, of so many thousands as would always be called ten; a point of some dignity, as well as some convenience: the story told well; he had not thrown himself away — he had gained a woman of ten thousand pounds, or thereabouts; and he had gained her with such delightful rapidity — the first hour of introduction had been so very soon followed by distinguishing notice; the history which he had to give Mrs. Cole of the rise and progress of the affair was so glorious — the steps so quick, from the accidental rencontre, to the dinner at Mr. Green’s, and the party at Mrs. Brown’s — smiles and blushes rising in importance — with consciousness and agitation richly scattered — the lady had been so easily impressed — so sweetly disposed — had in short, to use a most intelligible phrase, been so very ready to have him, that vanity and prudence were equally contented.”

Thomas Bernhard. “Correction.” 181 words.

“After a mild pulmonary infection, tended too little and too late, had suddenly turned into a severe pneumonia that took its toll of my entire body and laid me up for at least three months at nearby Wels, which has a hospital renowned in the field of so-called internal medicine, I accepted an invitation from Hoeller, a so-called taxidermist in the Aurach valley, not for the end of October, as the doctors urged, but for early in October, as I insisted, and then went on my own so-called responsibility straight to the Aurach valley and to Hoeller’s house, without even a detour to visit my parents in Stocket, straight into the so-called Hoeller garret, to begin sifting and perhaps even arranging the literary remains of my friend, who was also a friend of the taxidermist Hoeller, Roithamer, after Roithamer’s suicide, I went to work sifting and sorting the papers he had willed to me, consisting of thousands of slips covered with Roithamer’s handwriting plus a bulky manuscript entitled “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone.”

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Marcel Proust, “Remembrance of Things Past.” 192 words.

“No doubt this astonishment is to some extent due to the fact that the other person on such occasions presents some new facet; but so great is the multiformity of each individual, so abundant the wealth of lines of face and body, so few of which leave any trace, once we are no longer in the presence of the other person, we depend on the arbitrary simplicity of our recollection, since the memory has selected some distinctive feature that had struck us, has isolated it, exaggerated it, making of a woman who has appeared to us tall a sketch in which her figure is elongated out of all proportion, or of a woman who has seemed to be pink-cheeked and golden-haired a pure “Harmony in Pink and Gold”, and the moment this woman is once again standing before us, all the other forgotten qualities which balance that one remembered feature at once assail us, in their confused complexity, diminishing her height, paling her cheeks, and substituting for what we came exclusively to seek, other features which we remember having noticed the first time and fail to understand why we so little expected to find them again.”

A.A. Milne, “Winnie-the-Pooh.” 194 words.

“In after-years he liked to think that he had been in Very Great Danger during the Terrible Flood, but the only danger he had really been in was in the last half-hour of his imprisonment, when Owl, who had just flown up, sat on a branch of his tree to comfort him, and told him a very long story about an aunt who had once laid a seagull’s egg by mistake, and the story went on and on, rather like this sentence, until Piglet who was listening out of his window without much hope, went to sleep quietly and naturally, slipping slowly out of the window towards the water until he was only hanging on by his toes, at which moment luckily, a sudden loud squawk from Owl, which was really part of the story, being what his aunt said, woke the Piglet up and just gave him time to jerk himself back into safety and say, “How interesting, and did she?” when—well, you can imagine his joy when at last he saw the good ship, The Brain of Pooh ( Captain , C. Robin; 1 st Mate , P. Bear) coming over the sea to rescue him.”

Miguel de Cervantes, “Don Quixote.” 200 words. 

“About this time, when some rain began to fall, Sancho proposed that they should shelter themselves in the fulling-mill, but Don Quixote had conceived such abhorrence for it, on account of what was past, that he would no means set foot within its wall; wherefore, turning to the right-hand, they chanced to fall in with a road different from that in which they had traveled the day before; they had not gone far, when the knight discovered a man riding with something on his head, that glittered like polished gold, and scarce had he descried this phenomenon, when turning to Sancho, “I find,” said he, “that every proverb is strictly true; indeed, all of them are apophthegms dictated by experience herself; more especially, that which says, “shut one door, and another will soon open”: this I mention, because, if last night, fortune shut against us the door we fought to enter, by deceiving us with the fulling-hammers; today another stands wide open, in proffering to use us, another greater and more certain adventure, by which, if I fail to enter, it shall be my own fault, and not imputed to my ignorance of fulling-mills, or the darkness of the night.”

Cormac McCarthy, “All the Pretty Horses.” 205 words.

“That night he dreamt of horses on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.”

Charles Dickens, “Barnaby Rudge.” 216 words.

“There he sat, watching his wife as she decorated the room with flowers for the greater honour of Dolly and Joseph Willet, who had gone out walking, and for whom the tea-kettle had been singing gaily on the hob full twenty minutes, chirping as never kettle chirped before; for whom the best service of real undoubted china, patterned with divers round-faced mandarins holding up broad umbrellas, was now displayed in all its glory; to tempt whose appetites a clear, transparent, juicy ham, garnished with cool green lettuce-leaves and fragrant cucumber, reposed upon a shady table, covered with a snow-white cloth; for whose delight, preserves and jams, crisp cakes and other pastry, short to eat, with cunning twists, and cottage loaves, and rolls of bread both white and brown, were all set forth in rich profusion; in whose youth Mrs V. herself had grown quite young, and stood there in a gown of red and white: symmetrical in figure, buxom in bodice, ruddy in cheek and lip, faultless in ankle, laughing in face and mood, in all respects delicious to behold—there sat the locksmith among all and every these delights, the sun that shone upon them all: the centre of the system: the source of light, heat, life, and frank enjoyment in the bright household world.”

Henry James, “Italian Hours.” 221 words.

“To dwell in a city which, much as you grumble at it, is after all very fairly a modern city; with crowds and shops and theatres and cafes and balls and receptions and dinner-parties, and all the modern confusion of social pleasures and pains; to have at your door the good and evil of it all; and yet to be able in half an hour to gallop away and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and to look at the tufted broom glowing on a lonely tower-top in the still blue air, and the pale pink asphodels trembling none the less for the stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds leaning on their sticks in motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruin, and the scrambling goats and staggering little kids treading out wild desert smells from the top of hollow-sounding mounds; and then to come back through one of the great gates and a couple of hours later find yourself in the “world,” dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, talking about Middlemarch to a young English lady or listening to Neapolitan songs from a gentleman in a very low-cut shirt–all this is to lead in a manner a double life and to gather from the hurrying hours more impressions than a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose of.”

Cormac McCarthy, “Blood Meridian” 245 words

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Charles Dickens, “Barnaby Rudge.” 251 words.

“To none of these interrogatories, whereof every one was more pathetically delivered than the last, did Mrs Varden answer one word: but Miggs, not at all abashed by this circumstance, turned to the small boy in attendance—her eldest nephew—son of her own married sister—born in Golden Lion Court, number twenty-sivin, and bred in the very shadow of the second bell-handle on the right- hand door-post—and with a plentiful use of her pocket- handkerchief, addressed herself to him: requesting that on his return home he would console his parents for the loss of her, his aunt, by delivering to them a faithful statement of his having left her in the bosom of that family, with which, as his aforesaid parents well knew, her best affections were incorporated; that he would remind them that nothing less than her imperious sense of duty, and devoted attachment to her old master and missis, likewise Miss Dolly and young Mr Joe, should ever have induced her to decline that pressing invitation which they, his parents, had, as he could testify, given her, to lodge and board with them, free of all cost and charge, for evermore; lastly, that he would help her with her box upstairs, and then repair straight home, bearing her blessing and her strong injunctions to mingle in his prayers a supplication that he might in course of time grow up a locksmith, or a Mr Joe, and have Mrs Vardens and Miss Dollys for his relations and friends.”

David Foster Wallace, “Both Flesh and Not.” 258 words.

“There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner…until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side…and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The House of the Seven Gables.” 280 words.

“The purity of his judicial character, while on the bench; the faithfulness of his public service in subsequent capacities; his devotedness to his party, and the rigid consistency with which he had adhered to its principles, or, at all events, kept pace with its organized movements; his remarkable zeal as president of a Bible society; his unimpeachable integrity as treasurer of a widow’s and orphan’s fund; his benefits to horticulture, by producing two much-esteemed varieties of the pear, and to agriculture, through the agency of the famous Pyncheon-bull; the cleanliness of his moral deportment, for a great many years past; the severity with which he had frowned upon, and finally cast off, an expensive and dissipated son, delaying forgiveness until within the final quarter of an hour of the young man’s life; his prayers at morning and eventide, and graces at meal-time; his efforts in furtherance of the temperance cause; his confining himself, since the last attack of the gout, to five diurnal glasses of old sherry wine; the snowy whiteness of his linen, the polish of his boots, the handsomeness of his gold-headed cane, the square and roomy fashion of his coat, and the fineness of its material, and, in general, the studied propriety of his dress and equipment; the scrupulousness with which he paid public notice, in the street, by a bow, a lifting of the hat, a nod, or a motion of the hand, to all and sundry his acquaintances, rich or poor; the smile of broad benevolence wherewith he made it a point to gladden the whole world;–what room could possibly be found for darker traits, in a portrait made up of lineaments like these?”

Nicolai Gogol, “The Overcoat” 282 words.

“Even at the hour when the grey St. Petersburg sky had quite dispersed, and all the official world had eaten or dined, each as he could, in accordance with the salary he received and his own fancy; when all were resting from the departmental jar of pens, running to and fro from their own and other people’s indispensable occupations, and from all the work that an uneasy man makes willingly for himself, rather than what is necessary; when officials hasten to dedicate to pleasure the time which is left to them, one bolder than the rest going to the theatre; another, into the street looking under all the bonnets; another wasting his evening in compliments to some pretty girl, the star of a small official circle; another — and this is the common case of all — visiting his comrades on the fourth or third floor, in two small rooms with an ante-room or kitchen, and some pretensions to fashion, such as a lamp or some other trifle which has cost many a sacrifice of dinner or pleasure trip; in a word, at the hour when all officials disperse among the contracted quarters of their friends, to play whist, as they sip their tea from glasses with a kopek’s worth of sugar, smoke long pipes, relate at times some bits of gossip which a Russian man can never, under any circumstances, refrain from, and, when there is nothing else to talk of, repeat eternal anecdotes about the commandant to whom they had sent word that the tails of the horses on the Falconet Monument had been cut off, when all strive to divert themselves, Akakiy Akakievitch indulged in no kind of diversion.”

Jules Verne, “The Floating Island.” 286 words.

“I have the honour to acquaint his Excellency the Governor of Floating Island, at this moment in a hundred and seven-seven degrees thirteen minutes east of the meridian of Greenwich, and in sixteen degrees fifty-four minutes south latitude, that during the night of the 31 st of December and the 1 st of January, the steamer Glen , of Glasgow, of three thousand five hundred tons, laden with wheat indigo, rice, and wine, a cargo of considerable value, was run into by Floating Island, belonging to the Floating Island Company, Limited, whose offices are at Madeleine Bay, Lower California, United States of America, although the steamer was showing the regulation lights, a white at the foremast, green at the starboard side, and red at the port side, and that having got clear after the collision she was met with the next morning thirty-five miles from the scene of the disaster, ready to sink on account of a gap in her port side, and that she did sink after fortunately putting her captain, his officers and crew on board the Herald , Her Britannic Majesty’s cruiser of the first-class under the flag of Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Collison, who reports the fact to his Exellency Governor Cyrus Bikerstaff, requesting him to acknowledge the responsibility of the Floating Island Company, Limited, under the guarantee of the inhabitants of the said Floating Island, in favour of the owners of the said Glen , the value of which in hull, engines, and cargo amounts to the sum of twelve hundred thousand pounds sterling, that is six millions of dollars, which sum should be paid into the hands of the said Admiral Sir Edward Collinson, or in default he will forcibly proceed against the said Floating Island.”

Tolstoy, “War and Peace.” 307 words.

“But Count Rastopchin, who now shamed those who were leaving, now evacuated government offices, now distributed good-for-nothing weapons among the drunken riffraff, now took up icons, now forbade Augustin to evacuate relics and icons, now confiscated all private carts, now transported the hot-air balloon constructed by Leppich on a hundred and thirty-six carts, now hinted that he would burn Moscow, now told how he had burned his own house and wrote a proclamation to the French in which he solemnly reproached them for destroying his orphanage; now he assumed the glory of having burned Moscow, now he renounced it, now he ordered the people to catch all the spies and bring them to him, now he reproached the people for it, now he banished all the French from Moscow, now he allowed Mme Aubert-Chalmet, the center of all the French population of all Moscow, to remain in the city and ordered the old and venerable postmaster general Klyucharev, who had done nothing particularly wrong, to be arrested and exiled; now he gathered the people on the Three Hills to fight the French, now, in order to be rid of those same people, he turned them loose to murder a man and escaped through a back gate himself; now he said he would not survive the misfortune of Moscow, now he wrote French verses in an album about his part in the affair—this man did not understand the meaning of the event that was taking place, but only wanted to do something himself, to astonish someone or other, to accomplish something patriotically heroic, and, like a boy, frolicked over the majestic and inevitable event of the abandoning and burning of Moscow, and tried with his little hand now to encourage, now to stem the flow of the enormous current of people which carried him along with it.”

Vladimir Nabokov, “The Gift.” 309 words.

“He walked on toward the shop, but what he had just seen—whether because it had given him a kindred pleasure, or because it had taken him unawares and jolted him (as children in the hayloft fall into the resilient darkness)—released in him that pleasant something which for several days now had been at the murky bottom of his every thought, taking possession of him at the slightest provocation: my collection of poems has been published; and when as now, his mind tumbled like this, that is, when he recalled the fifty-odd poems that had just come out, he would skim in an instant the entire book, so that in an instantaneous mist of its madly accelerated music one could not make any readable sense of the flicking lines—the familiar words would rush past, swirling amid violent foam (whose seething was transformed into a mighty flowing motion if one fixed one’s eyes on it, as we used to do long ago, looking down at it from a vibrating mill bridge until the bridge turned into a ship’s stern: farewell!)—and this foam, and this flickering, and a separate verse that rushed past all alone, shouting in wild ecstasy from afar, probably calling him home, all of this, together with the creamy white of the cover, was merged in a blissful feeling of exceptional purity … What am I doing! he thought, abruptly coming to his senses and realizing that the first thing he had done upon entering the next shop was to dump the change he had received at the tobacconist’s onto the rubber islet in the middle of the glass counter, through which he glimpsed the submerged treasure of flasked perfumes, while the salesgirl’s gaze, condescending toward his odd behavior, followed with curiosity this absentminded hand paying for a purchase that had not yet been named.”

Martin Luther King, “A Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 310 words.

“But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

Richard Wright, “Native Son.” 318 words.

“It sounded suddenly directly above his head and when he looked it was not there but went on tolling and with each passing moment he felt an urgent need to run and hide as though the bell were sounding a warning and he stood on a street corner in a red glare of light like that which came from the furnace and he had a big package in his arms so wet and slippery and heavy that he could scarcely hold onto it and he wanted to know what was in the package and he stopped near an alley corner and unwrapped in and the paper fell away and he saw—it was his own head—his own head lying with black face and half-closed eyes and lips parted with white teeth showing and hair wet with blood and the red glare grew brighter like light shining down from a red moon and red stars on a hot summer night and he was sweating and breathless from running and the bell clanged so loud that he could hear the iron tongue clapping against the metal sides each time it swung to and fro and he was running over a street paved with black coal and his shoes kicked tiny lumps rattling against tin cans and he knew that very soon he had to find some place to hide but there was no place and in front of him white people were coming to ask about the head from which the newspapers had fallen and which was now slippery with blood in his naked hands and he gave up and stood in the middle of the street in the red darkness and cursed the booming bell and the white people and felt that he did not give a damn what happened to him and when the people closed in he hurled the bloody head squarely into their faces dongdongdong….”

Malcolm Lowry, “Under the Volcano.” 328 words.

“It is a light blue moonless summer evening, but late, perhaps ten o’clock, with Venus burning hard in daylight, so we are certainly somewhere far north, and standing on this balcony, when from beyond along the coast comes the gathering thunder of a long many-engineered freight train, thunder because though we are separated by this wide strip of water from it, the train is rolling eastward and the changing wind veers for a moment from an easterly quarter, and we face east, like Swedenborg’s angels, under a sky clear save where far to the northeast over distant mountains whose purple has faded lies a mass of almost pure white clouds, suddenly, as by a light in an alabaster lamp, illumined from within by gold lightning, yet you can hear no thunder, only the roar of the great train with its engines and its wide shunting echoes as it advances from the hills into the mountains: and then all at once a fishing boat with tall gear comes running round the point like a white giraffe, very swift and stately, leaving directly behind it a long silver scalloped rim of wake, not visibly moving inshore, but now stealing ponderously beachward toward us, this scrolled silver rim of wash striking the shore first in the distance, then spreading all along the curve of the beach, while the floats, for these are timber driving floats, are swayed together, everything jostled and beautifully ruffled and stirred and tormented in this rolling sleeked silver, then little by little calm again, and you see the reflection of the remote white thunderclouds in the water, and now the lightening within the white clouds in deep water, as the fishing boat itself with a golden scroll of travelling light in its silver wake beside it reflected from the cabin vanishes round the headland, silence, and then again, within the white white distant alabaster thunderclouds beyond the mountains, the thunderless gold lightening in the blue evening, unearthly.”

Jonathan Franzen, “The Corrections.” 359 words.

“He began a sentence: “I am–” but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn’t quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if  they  were the darkness, as if the darkness weren’t uniform, weren’t an absence of light but a teeming corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he’d encountered the word “crepuscular” in McKay’s  Treasury of English Verse , the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he’d seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn’t just exit but actively  consumed  the bearings that he’d sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he’d entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods–“packing my suitcase,” he heard himself say.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Marble Faun.” 374 words.

“When we have once known Rome, and left her where she lies, like a long-decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but with accumulated dust and a fungous growth overspreading all its more admirable features, left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage, so indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs,–left her, tired of the sight of those immense seven-storied, yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied, and weary of climbing those staircases, which ascend from a ground-floor of cook shops, cobblers’ stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists, just beneath the unattainable sky,–left her, worn out with shivering at the cheerless and smoky fireside by day, and feasting with our own substance the ravenous little populace of a Roman bed at night,–left her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man’s integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad cookery, needlessly bestowed on evil meats,–left her, disgusted with the pretence of holiness and the reality of nastiness, each equally omnipresent,–left her, half lifeless from the languid atmosphere, the vital principle of which has been used up long ago, or corrupted by myriads of slaughters,–left her, crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her ruin, and the hopelessness of her future, –left her, in short, hating her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the infinite anathema which her old crimes have unmistakably brought down,–when we have left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery, by and by, that our heart-strings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more intimately our home, than even the spot where we were born.”

Marcel Proust, “Swann’s Way.” 426 words.

“All these things and, still more than these, the treasures which had come to the church from personages who to me were almost legendary figures (such as the golden cross wrought, it was said, by Saint Eloi and presented by Dagobert, and the tomb of the sons of Louis the Germanic in porphyry and enamelled copper), because of which I used to go forward into the church when we were making our way to our chairs as into a fairy-haunted valley, where the rustic sees with amazement on a rock, a tree, a marsh, the tangible proofs of the little people’s supernatural passage — all these things made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town; a building which occupied, so to speak, four dimensions of space — the name of the fourth being Time — which had sailed the centuries with that old nave, where bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and hold down and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which the whole building had emerged triumphant, hiding the rugged barbarities of the eleventh century in the thickness of its walls, through which nothing could be seen of the heavy arches, long stopped and blinded with coarse blocks of ashlar, except where, near the porch, a deep groove was furrowed into one wall by the tower-stair; and even there the barbarity was veiled by the graceful gothic arcade which pressed coquettishly upon it, like a row of grown-up sisters who, to hide him from the eyes of strangers, arrange themselves smilingly in front of a countrified, unmannerly and ill-dressed younger brother; rearing into the sky above the Square a tower which had looked down upon Saint Louis, and seemed to behold him still; and thrusting down with its crypt into the blackness of a Merovingian night, through which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault, ribbed strongly as an immense bat’s wing of stone, Théodore or his sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert’s little daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been bored, or so it was said, “by a crystal lamp which, on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and with neither the crystal broken nor the light extinguished had buried itself in the stone, through which it had gently forced its way.”

Jose Saramago, “Blindness.” 440 words.

“The next day, while still in bed, the doctor’s wife said to her husband, We have little food left, we’ll have to go out again, I thought that today I would go back to the underground food store at the supermarket, the one I went to on the first day, if nobody else has found it, we can get supplies for a week or two, I’m coming with you and we’ll ask one or two of the others to come along as well, I’d rather go with you alone, it’s easier, and there is less danger of getting lost, How long will you be able to carry the burden of six helpless people, I’ll manage as long as I can, but you are quite right, I’m beginning to get exhausted, sometimes I even wish I were blind as well, to be the same as the others, to have no more obligations than they have, We’ve got used to depending on you, If you weren’t there, it would be like being struck with a second blindness, thanks to your eyes we are a little less blind, I’ll carry on as long as I can, I can’t promise you more than that, One day, when we realize that we can no longer do anything good and useful we ought to have the courage simply to leave this world, as he said, Who said that, The fortunate man we met yesterday, I am sure that he wouldn’t say that today, there is nothing like real hope to change one’s opinions, He has that all right, long may it last, In your voice there is a tone which makes me think you are upset, Upset, why, As if something had been taken away from you, Are you referring to what happened to the girl when we were at that terrible place, Yes, Remember it was she who wanted to have sex with me, Memory is deceiving you, you wanted her, Are you sure, I was not blind, Well, I would have sworn that, You would only perjure yourself, Strange how memory can deceive us, In this case it is easy to see, something that is offered to us is more ours than something we had to conquer, But she didn’t ever approach me again, and I never approached her, If you wanted to, you could find each other’s memories, that’s what memory is for, You are jealous, No, I’m not jealous, I was not even jealous on that occasion, I felt sorry for her and for you, and also for myself because I could not help you, How are we fixed for water, Badly.”

Herman Melville, “Moby Dick.” 467 words.

“Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognized a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things- the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph.” 475 words.

“I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland’s — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.”

Donald Antrim, “The Hundred Brothers.” 522 words.

“My brothers Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, Phil, Noah, William, Nick, Dennis, Christopher, Frank, Simon, Saul, Jim, Henry, Seamus, Richard, Jeremy, Walter, Jonathan, James, Arthur, Rex, Bertram, Vaughan, Daniel, Russel, and Angus; and the triplets Herbert, Patrick, and Jeffrey; identical twins Michael and Abraham, Lawrence and Peter, Winston and Charles, Scott and Samuel; and Eric, Donovan, Roger, Lester, Larry, Clinton, Drake, Gregory, Leon, Kevin, and Jack–all born on the same day, the twenty-third of May, though at different hours in separate years–and the caustic graphomaniac, Sergio, whose scathing opinions appear with regularity in the front-of-book pages of the more conservative monthlies, not to mention on the liquid crystal screens that glow at night atop the radiant work stations of countless bleary-eyed computer bulletinboard subscribers (among whom our brother is known, affectionately, electronically, as Surge); and Albert, who is blind; and Siegfried, the sculptor in burning steel; and clinically depressed Anton, schizophrenic Irv, recovering addict Clayton; and Maxwell, the tropical botanist, who, since returning from the rain forest, has seemed a little screwed up somehow; and Jason, Joshua, and Jeremiah, each vaguely gloomy in his own “lost boy” way; and Eli, who spends solitary wakeful evenings in the tower, filling notebooks with drawings–the artist’s multiple renderings for a larger work?–portraying the faces of his brothers, including Chuck, the prosecutor; Porter, the diarist; Andrew, the civil rights activist; Pierce, the designer of radically unbuildable buildings; Barry, the good doctor of medicine; Fielding, the documentary-film maker; Spencer, the spook with known ties to the State Department; Foster, the “new millennium” psychotherapist; Aaron, the horologist; Raymond, who flies his own plane; and George, the urban planner who, if you read the papers, you’ll recall, distinguished himself, not so long ago, with that innovative program for revitalizing the decaying downtown area (as “an animate interactive diorama illustrating contemporary cultural and economic folkways”), only to shock and amaze everyone, absolutely everyone, by vanishing with a girl named Jane and an overnight bag packed with municipal funds in unmarked hundreds; and all the young fathers: Seth, Rod, Vidal, Bennet, Dutch, Brice, Allan, Clay, Vincent, Gustavus, and Joe; and Hiram, the eldest; Zachary, the Giant; Jacob, the polymath; Virgil, the compulsive whisperer; Milton, the channeler of spirits who speak across time; and the really bad womanizers: Stephen, Denzil, Forrest, Topper, Temple, Lewis, Mongo, Spooner, and Fish; and, of course, our celebrated “perfect” brother, Benedict, recipient of a medal of honor from the Academy of Sciences for work over twenty years in chemical transmission of “sexual language” in eleven types of social insects–all of us (except George, about whom there have been many rumors, rumors upon rumors: he’s fled the vicinity, he’s right here under our noses, he’s using an alias or maybe several, he has a new face, that sort of thing)–all my ninety-eight, not counting George, brothers and I recently came together in the red library and resolved that the time had arrived, finally, to stop being blue, put the past behind us, share a light supper, and locate, if we could bear to, the missing urn full of the old fucker’s ashes.”

Roberto Bolano, “2666.” 554 words.

“That same day Kessler was at Cerro Estrella and he walked around Colonia Estrella and Colonia Hidalgo and explored the area along the Pueblo Azul highway and saw the ranches empty like shoe boxes, solid structures, graceless, functionless, that stood at the bends of the roads that ran into the Pueblo Azul highway, and then he wanted to see the neighborhoods along the border, Colonia Mexico, next to El Adobe, at which point you were back in the United States, the bars and restaurants and hotels of Colonia Mexico and its main street, where there was a permanent thunder of trucks and cars on their way to the border crossing, and then he made his entourage turn south along Avenida General Sepulveda and the Cananea highway, where they took a detour into Colonia La Vistosa, a place the police almost never ventured, one of the inspectors told him, the one who was driving, and the other one nodded sorrowfully, as if the absence of police in Colonia La Vistosa and Colonia Kino and Colonia Remedies Mayor was a shameful stain that they, zealous young men, bore with sorrow, and why sorrow? well, because impunity pained them, they said, whose impunity? the impunity of the gangs that controlled the drug trade in these godforsaken neighborhoods, something that made Kessler think, since in principle, looking out the car window at the fragmented landscape, it was hard to imagine any of the residents buying drugs, easy to imagine them using, but hard, very hard, to imagine them buying, digging in their pockets to come up with enough change to make a purchase, something easy enough to imagine in the black and Hispanic ghettos up north, neighborhoods that looked placid in comparison to this dismal chaos, but the two inspectors nodded, their strong, young jaws, that’s right, there’s lots of coke around here and all the filth that comes with it, and then Kessler looked out again at the landscape, fragmented or in the constant process of fragmentation, like a puzzle repeatedly assembled and disassembled, and told the driver to take him to the illegal dump El Chile, the biggest illegal dump in Santa Teresa, bigger than the city dump, where waste was disposed of not only by the maquiladora trucks but also by garbage trucks contracted by the city and some private garbage trucks and pickups, subcontracted or working in areas that public services didn’t cover, and then the car was back on paved streets and they seemed to head the way they’d come, returning to Colonia La Vistosa and the highway, but then they turned down a wider street, just as desolate, where even the brush was covered with a thick layer of dust, as if an atomic bomb had dropped nearby and no one had noticed, except the victims, thought Kessler, but they didn’t count because they’d lost their minds or were dead, even though they still walked and stared, their eyes and stares straight out of a Western, the stares of Indians or bad guys, of course, in other words lunatics, people living in another dimension, their gazes no longer able to touch us, we’re aware of them but they don’t touch us, they don’t adhere to our skin, they shoot straight through us, thought Kessler as he moved to roll down the window.”

David Foster Wallace, Oblivion , “Mister Squishy.” 562 words.

“Schmidt had had several years of psychotherapy and was not without some perspective on himself, and he knew that a certain percentage of his reaction to the way these older men coolly inspected their cuticles or pinched at the crease in the trouser of the topmost leg as they sat back on the coccyx joggling the foot of their crossed leg was just his insecurity, that he felt somewhat sullied and implicated by the whole enterprise of contemporary marketing and that this sometimes manifested via projection as the feeling that people he was trying to talk as candidly as possible to always believed he was making a sales pitch or trying to manipulate them in some way, as if merely being employed, however ephemerally, in the great grinding US marketing machine had somehow colored his whole being  and that something essentially shifty or pleading in his expression now always seemed inherently false or manipulative and turned people off, and not just in his career – which was not his whole existence, unlike so many at Team Δy, or even that terribly important to him; he had a vivid and complex inner life, and introspected a great deal – but in his personal affairs as well, and that somewhere along the line his professional marketing skills had metastasized through his whole character so that he was now the sort of man who, if he were to screw up his courage and ask a female colleague out for drinks and over drinks open his heart to her and reveal that he respected her enormously, that his feelings for her involved elements of both professional and highly personal regard, and that   he spent a great deal more time thinking about her than she probably had any idea he did, and that if there were anything at all he could ever do to make her life happier or easier or more satisfying or fulfilling he hoped she’d just say the word, for that is all she would have to do, say the word or snap her thick fingers or even just look at him in a meaningful way, and he’d be there, instantly and with no reservations at all, he would nevertheless in all probability be viewed as probably just wanting to sleep with her or fondle or harass her, or as having some creepy obsession with her, or as maybe even having a small creepy secretive shrine to her in one corner of the unused second bedroom of his condominium, consisting of personal items fished out of her cubicle’s wastebasket or the occasional dry witty little notes she passed him during especially deadly or absurd Team Δy staff meetings, or that his home Apple PowerBook’s screensaver was an Adobe-brand 1440-dpi blowup of a digital snapshot of the two of them with his arm over her shoulder and just part of the arm and shoulder of another Team Δy Field-worker with his arm over her shoulder from the other side at a Fourth of July picnic that A.C. Romney-Jaswat & Assoc. had thrown for its research subcontractors at Navy Pier two years past, Darlene holding her cup and smiling in such a way as to show almost as much upper gum as teeth, the ale’s cup’s red digitally enhanced to match her lipstick and the small scarlet rainbow she often wore just right of center as a sort of personal signature or statement.”

Thomas Bernhard, “Correction.” 720 words.

“The atmosphere in Hoeller’s house was still heavy, most of all with the circumstances of Roithamer’s suicide, and seemed from the moment of my arrival favorable to my plan of working on Roithamer’s papers there, specifically in Hoeller’s garret, sifting and sorting Roithamer’s papers and even, as I suddenly decided, simultaneously writing my own account of my work on these papers, as I have here begun to do, aided by having been able to move straight into Hoeller’s garret without any reservations on Hoeller’s part, even though the house had other suitable accommodations, I deliberately moved into that four-by-five-meter garret Roithamer was always so fond of, which was so ideal, especially in his last years, for his purposes, where I could stay as long as I liked, it was all the same to Hoeller, in this house built by the headstrong Hoeller in defiance of every rule of reason and architecture right here in the Aurach gorge, in the garret which Hoeller had designed and built as if for Roithamer’s purposes, where Roithamer, after sixteen years in England with me, had spent the final years of his life almost continuously, and even prior to that he had found it convenient to spend at least his nights in the garret, especially while he was building the Cone for his sister in the Kobernausser forest, all the time the Cone was under construction he no longer slept at home in Altensam but always and only in Hoeller’s garret, it was simply in every respect the ideal place for him during those last years when he, Roithamer, never went straight home to Altensam from England, but instead went every time to Hoeller’s garret, to fortify himself in its simplicity (Hoeller house) for the complexity ahead (Cone), it would not do to go straight to Altensam from England, where each of us, working separately in his own scientific field, had been living in Cambridge all those years, he had to go straight to Hoeller’s garret, if he did not follow this rule which had become a cherished habit, the visit to Altensam was a disaster from the start, so he simply could not let himself go directly from England to Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, whenever he had not made the detour via Hoeller’s house, to save time, as he himself admitted, it had been a mistake, so he no longer made the experiment of going to Altensam without first stopping at Hoeller’s house, in those last years, he never again went home without first visiting Hoeller and Hoeller’s family and Hoeller’s house, without first moving into Hoeller’s garret, to devote himself for two or three days to such reading as he could do only in Hoeller s garret, of subject matter that was not harmful but helpful o him, books and articles he could read neither in Altensam or in England, and to thinking and writing what he found possible to think and write neither in England nor in Altensam, here I discovered Hegel, he always said, over and over again, it was here that I really delved into Schopenhauer for the first time, here that I could read, for the first time, Goethe’sElective Affinities and The Sentimental Journey, without distraction and with a clear head, it was here, in Hoeller’s garret, that I suddenly gained access to ideas to which my mind had been sealed for decades before I came to this garret, access, he wrote, to the most essential ideas, the most important for me, the most necessary to my life, here in Hoeller’s garret, he wrote, everything became possible for me, everything that had always been impossible for me outside Hoeller’s garret, such as letting myself be guided by my intellectual inclinations and to develop my natural aptitudes accordingly, and to get on with my work, everywhere else I had always been hindered in developing my aptitudes but in Hoeller’s garret I could always develop them most consistently, here everything was congenial to my way of thinking, here I could always indulge myself in exploring all my intellectual possibilities, here my intellectual possibilities, here in Hoeller’s garret my head, my mind, my whole constitution were suddenly relieved from all the outside world’s oppression, the most incredible things were suddenly no longer incredible, the most impossible (thinking!) no longer impossible.”

Marcel Proust, “Remembrance of Things Past.” 958 words.

“Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy–at times from the society–of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter’s hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way that to themselves it does not appear a vice.”

Steven Millhauser, “Home Run.” 1147 words.

“Bottom of the ninth, two out, game tied, runners at the corners, the count full on McCluskey, the fans on their feet, this place is going wild, outfield shaded in to guard against the blooper, pitcher looks in, shakes off the sign, a big lead off first, they’re not holding him on, only run that matters is the man dancing off third, shakes off another sign, McCluskey asking for time, steps out of the box, tugs up his batter’s glove, knocks dirt from his spikes, it’s a cat ‘n’ mouse game, break up his rhythm, make him wait, now the big guy’s back in the box, down in his crouch, the tall lefty toes the rubber, looks in, gives the nod, will he go with the breaking ball, maybe thinking slider, third baseman back a step, catcher sets up inside, pitcher taking his time, very deliberate out there, now he’s ready, the set, the kick, he deals, it’s a fastball, straight down the pipe, McCluskey swings, a tremendous rip, he crushes it, the crowd is screaming, the centerfielder back, back, angling toward right, tons of room out there in no man’s land, still going back, he’s at the track, that ball is going, going, he’s at the wall, looking up, that ball is gone, see ya, hasta la vista baby, McCluskey goes yard, over the three-hundred-ninety-foot mark in right center, game over, he creamed it, that baby is gone and she ain’t comin back anytime soon, sayonara, the crowd yelling, the ball still carrying, the stands going crazy, McCluskey rounding second, the ball still up there, way up there, high over the right-centerfield bleachers, headed for the upper deck, talk about a tape-measure shot, another M-bomb from the Big M, been doing it all year, he’s rounding third, ball still going, still going, that ball was smoked, a no doubter, wait a minute wait a minute oh oh oh it’s outta here, that ball is out of the park, cleared the upper deck, up over the Budweiser sign, Jimmy can you get me figures on that, he hammered it clean outta here, got all of it, can you believe it, an out of the parker, hot diggity, slammed it a country mile, the big guy’s crossing the plate, team’s all over him, the crowd roaring, what’s that Jimmy, Jimmy are you sure, I’m being told it’s a first, that’s right a first, no one’s ever socked one out before, the Clusker really got around on it, looking fastball all the way, got the sweet part of the bat on it, launched a rocket, oh baby did he scald it, I mean he drilled it, the big guy is strong but it’s that smooth swing of his, the King of Swing, puts his whole body into it, hits with his legs, he smashed it, a Cooperstown clout, right on the screws, the ball still going, unbelievable, up past the Goodyear Blimp, see ya later alligator, up into the wild blue yonder, still going, ain’t nothing gonna stop that baby, they’re walking McCluskey back to the dugout, fans swarming all over the field, they’re pointing up at the sky, the ball still traveling, up real high, that ball is wayway outta here, Jimmy what have you got, going, going, hold on, what’s that Jimmy, I’m told the ball has gone all the way through the troposphere, is that a fact, now how about that, the big guy hit it a ton, really skyed it, up there now in the stratosphere, good golly Miss Molly, help me out here Jimmy, stratosphere starts at six miles and goes up 170,000 feet, man did he ever jack it outta here, a dinger from McSwinger, a whopper from the Big Bopper, going, going, the stands emptying out, the ball up in the mesosphere, the big guy blistered it, he powdered it, the ground crew picking up bottles and paper cups and peanut shells and hot dog wrappers, power-washing the seats, you can bet people’ll be talking about this one for a long time to come, he plastered that ball, a pitch right down Broadway, tried to paint the inside corner but missed his spot, you don’t want to let the big guy extend those arms, up now in the exosphere, way up there, never seen anything like it, the ball carrying well all day but who would’ve thought, wait a minute, hold on a second, holy cow it’s left the earth’s atmosphere, so long it’s been good ta know ya, up there now in outer space, I mean that ball is outta here, bye bye birdie, still going, down here at the park the stands are empty, sun gone down, moon’s up, nearly full, it’s a beautiful night, temperature seventy-three, another day game tomorrow then out to the West coast for a tough three-game series, the ball still going, looks like she’s headed for the moon, talk about a moon shot, man did he ever paste it outta here, higher, deeper, going, going, it’s gone past the moon, you can kiss that baby goodbye, goodnight Irene I’ll see you in my dreams, the big guy got good wood on it, right on the money, swinging for the downs, the ball still traveling, sailing past Mars, up through the asteroid belt, you gotta love it, past Jupiter, see ya Saturn, so long Uranus, arrivederci Neptune, up there now in the Milky Way, a round-tripper to the Big Dipper, a galaxy shot, a black-hole blast, how many stars are we talking about Jimmy, Jimmy says two hundred billion, that’s two hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, a nickel for every star and you can stop worrying about your 401K, the ball still traveling, out past the Milky Way and headed on into intergalactic space, hooo did he ever whack it, he shellacked it, a good season but came up short in the playoffs, McCluskey’ll be back next year, the ball out past the Andromeda galaxy, going, going, the big guy mashed it, he clob-bobbered it, wham-bam-a-rammed it, he’s looking good in spring training, back with that sweet swing, out past the Virgo supercluster with its thousands of galaxies, that ball was spanked, a Big Bang for the record book, a four-bagger with swagger, out past the Hydra-Centaurus supercluster, still going, out past the Aquarius supercluster, thousands and millions of superclusters out there, McCluskey still remembers it, he’s coaching down in Triple A, the big man a sensation in his day, the ball still out there, still climbing, sailing out toward the edge of the observable universe, the edge receding faster than the speed of light, the ball still going, still going, he remembers the feel of the wood in his hands, the good sound of it as he swung, smell of pine tar, bottom of the ninth, two on, two out, a summer day.”

David Foster Wallace, “The Pale King.” 1185 words.

“Part of what kept him standing in the restive group of men waiting authorization to enter the airport was a kind of paralysis that resulted from Sylvanshine’s reflecting on the logistics of getting to the Peoria 047 REC – the issue of whether the REC sent a van for transfers or whether Sylvanshine would have to take a cab from the little airport had not been conclusively resolved – and then how to arrive and check in and where to store his three bags while he checked in and filled out his arrival and Post-code payroll and withholding forms and orientational materials then somehow get directions and proceed to the apartment that Systems had rented for him at government rates and get there in time to find someplace to eat that was either in walking distance or would require getting another cab – except the telephone in the alleged apartment wasn’t connected yet and he considered the prospects of being able to hail a cab from outside an apartment window complex were at best iffy, and if he told the original cab he’d taken to the apartment to wait for him, there would be difficulties because how exactly would he reassure the cabbie that he really was coming right back out after dropping his bags and doing a quick spot check of the apartment’s condition and suitability instead of it being a ruse designed to defraud the driver of his fare, Sylvanshine ducking out the back of the Angler’s Cove apartment complex or even conceivably barricading himself in the apartment and not responding to the driver’s knock, or his ring if the apartment had a doorbell, which his and Reynold’s current apartment in Martinsburg most assuredly did not, or the driver’s queries/threats through the apartment door, a scam that resided in Claude Sylvanshine’s awareness only because a number of independent Philadelphia commercial carriage operators had proposed heavy Schedule C losses under the provisio “Losses Through Theft of Service” and detailed this type of scam as prevalent on the poorly typed or sometimes even handwritten attachments required to explain unusual or specific C-deductions like this, whereas were Sylvanshine to pay the fare and tip and perhaps even a certain amount in advance on account so as to help assure the driver of his honorable intentions re the second leg of the sojourn there was no tangible guarantee that the average taxi driver – a cynical and ethically marginal species, hustlers, as even their sumdged returns’ very low tip-income-vs-number-of-fares-in-an-average-shift ratios in Philly had indicated – wouldn’t simply speed away with Sylvanshine’s money, creating enormous hassles in terms of filling out the internal forms for getting a percentage of his travel per diem reimbursed and also leaving Sylvanshine alone, famished (he was unable to eat before travel), phoneless, devoid of Reynold’s counsel and logistical savvy in the sterile new unfurnished apartment, his stomach roiling in on itself in such a way that it would be all Sylvanshine could to unpack in any kind of half-organized fashion and get to sleep on the nylon travel pallet on the unfinished floor in the possible presence of exotic Midwestern bugs, to say nothing of putting in the hour of CPA exam review he’d promised himself this morning when he’d overslept slightly and then encountered last-minute packing problems that had canceled out the firmly scheduled hour of morning CPA review before one of the unmarked Systems vans arrived to take him and his bags out through Harpers Ferry and Ball’s Bluff to the airport, to say even less about any kind of systematic organization and mastery of the voluminous Post, Duty, Personnel, and Systems Protocols materials he should be receiving promptly after check-in and forms processing at the Post, which any reasonable Personnel Director would expect a new examiner to have thoroughly internalized before reporting for the first actual day interacting with REC examiners, and which there was no way in any real world that Sylanshine could expect himself to try to review and internalize on either a sixteen-hour fast or a night on the pallet with his damp raincoat as a pillow – he had been unable to pack the special contoured orthotic pillow for his neck’s chronic pinched or inflamed nerve; it would have required its own suitcase and thereby exceeded the baggage limit and incurred an exorbitant surcharge which Reynolds refused to let Sylvanshine pay out of same principle – with the additional problem of securing any sort of substantive breakfast or return ride to the REC in the morning without a phone, or how without a phone one was supposed to even try to verify whether and when the apartment phone was going to be activated, plus of course the ominous probability of oversleeping the next morning due to both travel fatigue and his not having packed his traveler’s alarm clock – or at any rate not having been certain that he’d packed in instead of allowing it to go into one of the three large cartons that he had packed and labeled but done a hasty, slipshod job of writing out Contents Lists for the boxes to refer to when unpacking them in Peoria, and which Reynolds had pledged to insert into the Service’s Support Branch shipping mechanism at roughly the same time Sylvanshine’s flight was scheduled to depart from Dulles, which meant two or possibly even three days before the cartons with all the essentials Sylvanshine had not been able to fit into his bags arrived, and even then they would arrive at the REC and it was as yet unclear how Claude would then them home to the apartment – the realization about the traveler’s alarm having been the chief cause of Sylvanshine’s having to unlock and open all the carefully packed luggage that morning on arising already half an hour late, to try to locate or verify the inclusion of the portable alarm, which he had failed to do – the whole thing presenting such a cyclone of logistical problems and complexities that Sylvanshine was forced to some some Thought Stopping right there on the wet tarmac surrounded by restive breathers, turning 360-degrees several times and trying to merge his own awareness with the panoramic vista, which except for airport-related items was uniformly featureless and old-coin gray and so remarkably flat that it was as if the earth here had been stamped on with some cosmic boot, visibility in all directions limited only by the horizon, which was the same general color and texture as the sky and created the specular impression of being in the center of some huge and stagnant body of water, an oceanic impression so literally obliterating that Sylvanshine was cast or propelled back in on himself and felt again the edge of the shadow of the wing of Total Terror and Disqualification pass over him, the knowledge of his being surely and direly ill-suited for whatever lay ahead, and of its being only a matter of time before this fact emerged and was made manifest to all those present in the moment that Sylvanshine finally, and forever, lost it.”

Roderick Moody-Corbett, “Parse.” 1203 words.

“You know that you will see him again, at least you have told yourself not to worry, not to, in the words of your psychiatrist, Dr. Blackmur, with whom you’ve not spoken in seventy-two hours, “let things snowball,” and that this—whatever it is that’s happening to you right now—is not necessarily an ending so much as an interstice, by which you seem to mean, vaguely, a kind of brief emotive pause, a regrouping, of sorts, during which time you will both try and get your respective shit (s?) together, so that one day, and, you hope, one day soon, you might share a sleazy Sunday afternoon together, hungover, occasionally tumbling into an eager, tingly, greedy kind of sex (a sex so deeply parasitic that you feel, like vampires, a need to drink it), and then, post-coitus, each of you tolerably sated, his head, the benign humidity of his left temple, say, murmuring on your chest, a Sunday, a potted avocado seed beginning to doff its husk on the windowsill, and the window, then, with rain or sun or sleet behind it, and a feeling of gratitude that you are all too grateful to notice, fleeting, you’d call it, this feeling, which, it suddenly occurs to you, you may never again know the daytime delirium of—or so you try not to tell yourself as muscling two suitcases down the narrow, slippery, improbably leaf-blistered steps (of what, technically speaking, is no longer your guys’ apartment) and towards the curb where, any minute now, a cab, a checkered yellow-black hearse, will glide up and take you to the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, where, having puzzled around the Porter Terminal some twenty-three minutes, a kind of wide tugboat type thing will drag you and your two miserable suitcases (of which, just your luck, the heavier of the two has a broken wheel) to the airport proper, where you will, almost finally, fly home—St. John’s—even though the word home, or, the very notion of home, doesn’t quite make sense to you at this particular moment, because, let’s face it, welling up inside of you—recall, you’re still very much on the curb here—is this horrible and excruciating sense of homelessness that manifests itself as a kind of bowel-deep sphincter-bristling angst, and you feel that what you are leaving, or, no, in the spirit of pained specificity, what you are basically on the precipice of almost leaving—a bright two bedroom apartment with two patios, one windowless bathroom, and a kitchen with beech countertops, sooty-mauve walls and terracotta tiles—feels, even as you are so clearly leaving it, very much like a home, and how the fuck does that work, you wonder, idiotically, just as he, the man you are promising yourself you will one day see again, comes down the steps bearing a small white dog, a Pomeranian, with its simple moist snout, a ludicrous little animal that you’ve come, in recent months, to adore, tic-tac brain, raisin eyes et al.—and it doesn’t help that this man has tears, the beginnings of tears, in his eyes, and that now, quite suddenly, so do you, and it’s almost nine o’clock in the morning on like—this kills you—a fucking Tuesday, you think, and the last thing you want to be doing is saying goodbye to the man you, trite as it sounds, love, while around you surges an indolent chatter of morning traffic, caroming buses and streetcars and somewhere, not so far off, perhaps, the dopplering bray of an ambulance, and maybe, because you still love him, you feel it, this sense of incumbent regret, crawling through your chest so much so that it sends a few nervy jots of phlegm swimming up your throat, and but then—check this out, yes, see—here comes the cabby and now you’re on the clock because, holy shit, this guy’s face—jowly and hale, with telltale pouches of insomnia, like bruisy garlic cloves, slung beneath his eyes—seems stilled in a kind of harried rictus, and yet, and yet, you want this moment, horrible as it is, to last, if not forever, then at least a few minutes more, because, God, it just might be the last time—but, you say, don’t tell yourself this—as the man you are promising yourself you will one day see again leans into you and your five o’clock shadows lock like a bad similes, and he says, in a voice you are already beginning to forget, I love you, and you kiss, for some reason, the dog first, you press your index finger on its wet snout—and, rebuking you somewhat (in this, the dog seems just as impatient as the cabby)—you hold him close, dog and man, and you whisper in his ear, as much for him as for, you suppose, yourself, this isn’t the end of anything, I promise, we’ll see each other soon, even though, all of a sudden, you’re not, you’re in the cab and you’re telling the driver—who, what with his spade chin and lean veiny nose, you feel is pretty wise to what’s going on and (judging from the dour officiousness of his “Where you headed?”) maybe even just a little bit repelled and slightly resentful of you for having implicated him, poor guy, in the middle of it—you tell him: drive man, just like, you know, fucking drive, and, as he begins to edge out onto Queen, the fervid snick of his turn signal beating down on you, an insomnious pulse, you suffer one final glance out the back window and it’s an image of him, looming out of a rearview swell of cirrus, cradling that ludicrous Pomeranian, just standing there, mute and numb, in that upsized Adidas jacket, the one you picked out for him last Christmas at the Sally-Ann in Markham, and which, given its size or his size, you’d purchased more or less as a joke, and which he’d inadvertently loved, and now something, something in the far-flung comedy of this memory, man, it just about kills you (again), and you almost hope he’s crying, to feel how wet his eyes are because you’re crying, his eyes are your eyes—you look at me and eye you, etc.—and you want, suddenly, to scream: PAUSE!, just pull this fucking cab to the side of the road and let me the fuck out, but you don’t—because, and this will be important later, this, as Dr. Blackmur might say, sotto voce, “will definitely be on the final exam,” it has just now occurred to you that your sickness has no soundtrack—you drive, and this feeling, yes, yes, trite and banal and horrible as it is, it stays with you, and the only way to fight this feeling is to have faith, so you tell yourself not to worry, probably you will almost definitely see him again, keep saying it, until, like some kind of cunning liturgical chant spilled from the parched and cracking lips of a neo-Gregorian supplicant, the words become bloated and vague and, semiotically speaking, opaque: this, whatever it is, isn’t the end of anything, keep telling yourself this, hope.”

William Faulkner, “Absalom, Absalom.” 1289 words.

“Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realised at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realises that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realises that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point.”

Samuel Beckett, “The Unnamable.” 1672 words.

“The place, I’ll make it all the same, I’ll make it in my head, I’ll draw it out of my memory, I’ll gather it all about me, I’ll make myself a head, I’ll make myself a memory, I have only to listen, the voice will tell me everything, tell it to me again, everything I need, in dribs and drabs, breathless, it’s like a confession, a last confession, you think it’s finished, then it starts off again, there were so many sins, the memory is so bad, the words don’t come, the words fail, the breath fails, no, it’s something else, it’s an indictment, a dying voice accusing, accusing me, you must accuse someone, a culprit is indispensable, it speaks of my sins, it speaks of my head, it says it’s mine, it says that I repent, that I want to be punished, better than I am, that I want to go, give myself up, a victim is essential, I have only to listen, it will show me my hiding-place, what it’s like, where the door is, if there’s a door, and whereabouts I am in it, and what lies between us, how the land lies, what kind of country, whether it’s sea, or whether it’s mountain, and the way to take, so that I may go, make my escape, give myself up, come to the place where the axe falls, without further ceremony, on all who come from here, I’m not the first, I won’t be the first, it will best me in the end, it has bested better than me, it will tell me what to do, in order to rise, move, act like a body endowed with despair, that’s how I reason, that’s how I hear myself reasoning, all lies, it’s not me they’re calling, not me they’re talking about, it’s not yet my turn, it’s someone else’s turn, that’s why I can’t stir, that’s why I don’t feel a body on me, I’m not suffering enough yet, it’s not yet my turn, not suffering enough to be able to stir, to have a body, complete with head, to be able to understand, to have eyes to light the way, I merely hear, without understanding, without being able to profit by it, by what I hear, to do what, to rise and go and be done with hearing, I don’t hear everything, that must be it, the important things escape me, it’s not my turn, the topographical and anatomical information in particular is lost on me, no, I hear everything, what difference does it make, the moment it’s not my turn, my turn to understand, my turn to live, my turn of the lifescrew, it calls that living, the space of the way from here to the door, it’s all there, in what I hear, somewhere, if all has been said, all this long time, all must have been said, but it’s not my turn to know what, to know what I am, where I am, and what I should do to stop being it, to stop being there, that’s coherent, so as to be another, no, the same, I don’t know, depart into life, travel the road, find the door, find the axe, perhaps it’s a cord, for the neck, for the throat, for the cords, or fingers, I’ll have eyes, I’ll see fingers, it will be the silence, perhaps it’s a drop, find the door, open the door, drop, into the silence, it won’t be I, I’ll stay here, or there, more likely there, it will never be I, that’s all I know, it’s all been done already, said and said again, the departure, the body that rises, the way, in colour, the arrival, the door that opens, closes again, it was never I, I’ve never stirred, I’ve listened, I must have spoken, why deny it, why not admit it, after all, I deny nothing, I admit nothing, I say what I hear, I hear what I say, I don’t know, one or the other, or both, that makes three possibilities, pick your fancy, all these stories about travelers, these stories about paralytics, all are mine, I must be extremely old, or it’s memory playing tricks, if only I knew if I’ve lived, if I live, if I’ll live, that would simplify everything, impossible to find out, that’s where you’re buggered, I haven’t stirred, that’s all I know, no, I know something else, it’s not I, I always forget that, I resume, you must resume, never stirred from here, never stopped telling stories, to myself, hardly hearing them, hearing something else, listening for something else, wondering now and then where I got them from, was I in the land of the living, were they in mine, and where, where do I store them, in my head, I don’t feel a head on me, and what do I tell them with, with my mouth, same remark, and what do I hear them with, and so on, the old rigmarole, it can’t be I, or it’s because I pay no heed, it’s such an old habit, I do it without heeding, or as if I were somewhere else, there I am far again, there I am the absentee again, it’s his turn again now, he who neither speaks nor listens, who has neither body nor soul, it’s something else he has, he must have something, he must be somewhere, he is made of silence, there’s a pretty analysis, he’s in the silence, he’s the one to be sought, the one to be, the one to be spoken of, the one to speak, but he can’t speak, then I could stop, I’d be he, I’d be the silence, I’d be back in the silence, we’d be reunited, his story the story to be told, but he has no story, he hasn’t been in story, it’s not certain, he’s in his own story, unimaginable, unspeakable, that doesn’t matter, the attempt must be made, in the old stories incomprehensibly mine, to find his, it must be there somewhere, it must have been mine, before being his, I’ll recognize it, in the end I’ll recognize it, the story of the silence that he never left, that I should never have left, that I may never find again, that I may find again, then it will be he, it will be I, it will be the place, the silence, the end, the beginning, the beginning again, how can I say it, that’s all words, they’re all I have, and not many of them, the words fail, the voice fails, so be it, I know that well, it will be the silence, full of murmurs, distant cries, the usual silence, spent listening, spent waiting, waiting for the voice, the cries abate, like all cries, that is to say they stop, the murmurs cease, they give up, the voice begins again, it begins trying again, quick now before there is none left, no voice left, nothing left but the core of murmurs, distant cries, quick now and try again, with the words that remain, try what, I don’t know, I’ve forgotten, it doesn’t matter, I never knew, to have them carry me into my story, the words that remain, my old story, which I’ve forgotten, far from here, through the noise, through the door, into the silence, that must be it, it’s too late, perhaps it’s too late, perhaps they have, how would I know, in the silence you don’t know, perhaps it’s the door, perhaps I’m at the door, that would surprise me, perhaps it’s I, perhaps somewhere or other it was I, I can depart, all this time I’ve journeyed without knowing it, it’s I now at the door, what door, what’s a door doing here, it’s the last words, the true last, or it’s the murmurs, the murmurs are coming, I know that well, no, not even that, you talk of murmurs, distant cries, as long as you can talk, you talk of them before and you talk of them after, more lies, it will be the silence, the one that doesn’t last, spent listening, spent waiting, for it to be broken, for the voice to break it, perhaps there’s no other, I don’t know, it’s not worth having, that’s all I know, it’s not I, that’s all I know, it’s not mine, it’s the only one I ever had, that’s a lie, I must have had the other, the one that lasts, but it didn’t last, I don’t understand, that is to say it did, it still lasts, I’m still in it, I left myself behind in it, I’m waiting for me there, no, there you don’t wait, you don’t listen, I don’t know, perhaps it’s a dream, all a dream, that would surprise me, I’ll wake, in the silence, and never sleep again, it will be I, or dream, dream again, dream of a silence, a dream silence, full of murmurs, I don’t know, that’s all words, never wake, all words, there’s nothing else, you must go on, that’s all I know, they’re going to stop, I know that well, I can feel it, they’re going to abandon me, it will be the silence, for a moment, a good few moments, or it will be mine, the lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts, it will be I, you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Donald Barthelme, “The Sentence.” 2,569 words.

“Or a long sentence moving at a certain pace down the page aiming for the bottom-if not the bottom of this page then some other page-where it can rest, or stop for a moment to think out the questions raised by its own (temporary) existence, which ends when the page is turned, or the sentence falls out of the mind that holds it (temporarily) in some kind of embrace, not necessarily an ardent one, but more perhaps the kind of embrace enjoyed (or endured), by a wife who has just waked up and is on her way to the bathroom in the morning to wash her hair, and is bumped into by her husband, who has been lounging at the breakfast table reading the newspaper, and doesn’t see her coming out of the bedroom, but, when he bumps into her, or is bumped into by her, raises his hands to embrace her lightly, transiently, because he knows that if he gives her a real embrace so early in the morning, before she has properly shaken the dreams out of her head, and got her duds on, she won’t respond, and may even become slightly angry, and say something wounding, and so the husband invests in this embrace not so much physical or emotional pressure as he might, because he doesn’t want to waste anything-with this sort of feeling, then, the sentence passes through the mind more or less, and there is another way of describing the situation too, which is to say that the sentence crawls through the mind like something someone says to you while you are listening very hard to the FM radio, some rock group there, with its thrilling sound, and so, with your attention or the major part of it at least already rewarded, there is not much mind room you can give to the remark, especially considering that you have probably just quarreled with that person, the maker of the remark, over the radio being too loud, or something like that, and the view you take, of the remark, is that you’d really rather not hear it, but if you have to hear it, you want to listen to it for the smallest possible length of time, and during a commercial, because immediately after the commercial they’re going to play a new rock song by your favorite group, a cut that has never been aired before, and you want to hear it and respond to it in a new way, a way that accords with whatever you’re feeling at the moment, or might feel, if the threat of new experience could be (temporarily) overbalanced by the promise of possible positive benefits, or what the mind construes as such, remembering that these are often, really, disguised defeats (not that such defeats are not, at times, good for your character, teaching you that it is not by success alone that one surmounts life, but that setbacks, too, contribute to that roughening of the personality that, by providing a textured surface to place against that of life, enables you to leave slight traces, or smudges, on the face of human history-your mark) and after all, benefit-seeking always has something of the smell of raw vanity about it, as if you wished to decorate your own brow with laurel, or wear your medals to a cookout, when the invitation had said nothing about them, and although the ego is always hungry (we are told) it is well to remember that ongoing success is nearly as meaningless as ongoing lack of success, which can make you sick, and that it is good to leave a few crumbs on the table for the rest of your brethren, not to sweep it all into the little beaded purse of your soul but to allow others, too, part of the gratification, and if you share in this way you will find the clouds smiling on you, and the postman bringing you letters, and bicycles available when you want to rent them, and many other signs, however guarded and limited, of the community’s (temporary) approval of you, or at least of it’s willingness to let you believe (temporarily) that it finds you not so lacking in commendable virtues as it had previously allowed you to think, from its scorn of your merits, as it might be put, or anyway its consistent refusal to recognize your basic humanness and its secret blackball of the project of your remaining alive, made in executive session by its ruling bodies, which, as everyone knows, carry out concealed programs of reward and punishment, under the rose, causing faint alterations of the status quo, behind your back, at various points along the periphery of community life, together with other enterprises not dissimilar in tone, such as producing films that have special qualities, or attributes, such as a film where the second half of it is a holy mystery, and girls and women are not permitted to see it, or writing novels in which the final chapter is a plastic bag filled with water, which you can touch, but not drink: in this way, or ways, the underground mental life of the collectivity is botched, or denied, or turned into something else never imagined by the planners, who, returning from the latest seminar in crisis management and being asked what they have learned, say they have learned how to throw up their hands; the sentence meanwhile, although not insensible of these considerations, has a festering conscience of its own, which persuades it to follow its star, and to move with all deliberate speed from one place to another, without losing any of the “riders” it may have picked up just being there, on the page, and turning this way and that, to see what is over there, under that oddly-shaped tree, or over there, reflected in the rain barrel of the imagination, even though it is true that in our young manhood we were taught that short, punchy sentences were best (but what did he mean? doesn’t “punchy” mean punch-drunk? I think he probably intended to say “short, punching sentences,” meaning sentences that lashed out at you, bloodying your brain if possible, and looking up the word just now I came across the nearby “punkah,” which is a large fan suspended from the ceiling in India, operated by an attendant pulling a rope-that is what I want for my sentence, to keep it cool!) we are mature enough now to stand the shock of learning that much of what we were taught in our youth was wrong, or improperly understood by those who were teaching it, or perhaps shaded a bit, the shading resulting from the personal needs of the teachers, who as human beings had a tendency to introduce some of their heart’s blood into their work, and sometimes this may not have been of the first water, this heart’s blood, and even if they thought they were moving the “knowledge” out, as the Board of Education had mandated, they could have noticed that their sentences weren’t having the knockdown power of the new weapons whose bullets tumble end-over-end (but it is true that we didn’t have these weapons at that time) and they might have taken into account the fundamental dubiousness of their project (but all the intelligently conceived projects have been eaten up already, like the moon and the stars) leaving us, in our best clothes, with only things to do like conducting vigorous wars of attrition against our wives, who have now thoroughly come awake, and slipped into their striped bells, and pulled sweaters over their torsi, and adamantly refused to wear any bras under the sweaters, carefully explaining the political significance of this refusal to anyone who will listen, or look, but not touch, because that has nothing to do with it, so they say; leaving us, as it were, with only things to do like floating sheets of Reynolds Wrap around the room, trying to find out how many we can keep in the air at the same time, which at least gives us a sense of participation, as though we were Buddha, looking down at the mystery of your smile, which needs to be investigated, and I think I’ll do that right now, while there’s still enough light, if you’ll sit down over there, in the best chair, and take off all your clothes, and put your feet in that electric toe caddy (which prevents pneumonia) and slip into this permanent press hospital gown, to cover your nakedness-why, if you do all that, we’ll be ready to begin! after I wash my hands, because you pick up an amazing amount of exuviae in this city, just by walking around in the open air, and nodding to acquaintances, and speaking to friends, and copulating with lovers, in the ordinary course (and death to our enemies! by and by)-but I’m getting a little uptight, just about washing my hands, because I can’t find the soap, which somebody has used and not put back in the soap dish, all of which is extremely irritating, if you have a beautiful patient sitting in the examining room, naked inside her gown, and peering at her moles in the mirror, with her immense brown eyes following your every movement (when they are not watching the moles, expecting them, as in a Disney nature film, to exfoliate) and her immense brown head wondering what you’re going to do to her, the pierced places in the head letting that question leak out, while the therapist decides just to wash his hands in plain water, and hang the soap! and does so, and then looks around for a towel, but all the towels have been collected by the towel service, and are not there, so he wipes his hands on his pants, in the back (so as to avoid suspicious stains on the front) thinking: what must she think of me? and, all this is very unprofessional and at-sea looking! trying to visualize the contretemps from her point of view, if she has one (but how can she? she is not in the washroom) and then stopping, because it is finally his own point of view that he cares about and not hers, and with this firmly in mind, and a light, confident step, such as you might find in the works of Bulwer-Lytton, he enters the space she occupies so prettily and, taking her by the hand, proceeds to tear off the stiff white hospital gown (but no, we cannot have that kind of pornographic merde in this majestic and high-minded sentence, which will probably end up in the Library of Congress) (that was just something that took place inside his consciousness, as he looked at her, and since we know that consciousness is always consciousness of something, she is not entirely without responsibility in the matter) so, then, taking her by the hand, he falls into the stupendous white puree of her abyss, no, I mean rather that he asks her how long it has been since her last visit, and she says a fortnight, and he shudders, and tells her that with a condition like hers (she is an immensely popular soldier, and her troops win all their battles by pretending to be forests, the enemy discovering, at the last moment, that those trees they have eaten their lunch under have eyes and swords) (which reminds me of the performance, in 1845, of Robert-Houdin, called The Fantastic Orange Tree, wherein Robert-Houdin borrowed a lady’s handkerchief, rubbed it between his hands and passed it into the center of an egg, after which he passed the egg into the center of a lemon, after which he passed the lemon into the center of an orange, then pressed the orange between his hands, making it smaller and smaller, until only a powder remained, whereupon he asked for a small potted orange tree and sprinkled the powder thereupon, upon which the tree burst into blossom, the blossoms turning into oranges, the oranges turning into butterflies, and the butterflies turning into beautiful young ladies, who then married members of the audience), a condition so damaging to real-time social intercourse of any kind, the best thing she can do is give up, and lay down her arms, and he will lie down in them, and together they will permit themselves a bit of the old slap and tickle, she wearing only her Mr. Christopher medal, on its silver chain, and he (for such is the latitude granted the professional classes) worrying about the sentence, about its thin wires of dramatic tension, which have been omitted, about whether we should write down some natural events occurring in the sky (birds, lightning bolts), and about a possible coup d’etat within the sentence, whereby its chief verb would be-but at this moment a messenger rushes into the sentence, bleeding from a hat of thorns he’s wearing, and cries out: “You don’t know what you’re doing! Stop making this sentence, and begin instead to make Moholy-Nagy cocktails, for those are what we really need, on the frontiers of bad behavior!” and then he falls to the floor, and a trap door opens under him, and he falls through that, into a damp pit where a blue narwhal waits, its horn poised (but maybe the weight of the messenger, falling from such a height, will break off the horn)-thus, considering everything very carefully, in the sweet light of the ceremonial axes, in the run-mad skimble-skamble of information sickness, we must make a decision as to whether we should proceed, or go back, in the latter case enjoying the pathos of eradication, in which the former case reading an erotic advertisement which begins, How to Make Your Mouth a Blowtorch of Excitement (but wouldn’t that overtax our mouthwashes?) attempting, during the pause, while our burned mouths are being smeared with fat, to imagine a better sentence, worthier, more meaningful, like those in the Declaration of Independence, or a bank statement showing that you have seven thousand kroner more than you thought you had-a statement summing up the unreasonable demands that you make on life, and one that also asks the question, if you can imagine these demands, why are they not routinely met, tall fool? but of course it is not that query that this infected sentence has set out to answer (and hello! to our girl friend, Rosetta Stone, who has stuck by us through thick and thin) but some other query that we shall some day discover the nature of, and here comes Ludwig, the expert on sentence construction we have borrowed from the Bauhaus, who will-“Guten Tag, Ludwig!”-probably find a way to cure the sentence’s sprawl, by using the improved way of thinking developed in Weimer-“I am sorry to inform you that the Bauhaus no longer exists, that all of the great masters who formerly thought there are either dead or retired, and that I myself have been reduced to constructing books on how to pass the examination for police sergeant”-and Ludwig falls through the Tugendhat House into the history of man-made objects; a disappointment, to be sure, but it reminds us that the sentence itself is a man-made object, not the one we wanted of course, but still a construction of man, a structure to be treasured for its weakness, as opposed to the strength of stones”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship.” 2156 words.

“Now they’re going to see who I am, he said to himself in his strong new man’s voice, many years after he had first seen the huge ocean liner without lights and without any sound which passed by the village one night like a great uninhabited place, longer than the whole village and much taller than the steeple of the church, and it sailed by in the darkness toward the colonial city on the other side of the bay that had been fortified against buccaneers, with its old slave port and the rotating light, whose gloomy beams transfigured the village into a lunar encampment of glowing houses and streets of volcanic deserts every fifteen seconds, and even though at that time he’d been a boy without a man’s strong voice but with his’ mother’s permission to stay very late on the beach to listen to the wind’s night harps, he could still remember, as if still seeing it, how the liner would disappear when the light of the beacon struck its side and how it would reappear when the light had passed, so that it was an intermittent ship sailing along, appearing and disappearing, toward the mouth of the bay, groping its way like a sleep‐walker for the buoys that marked the harbor channel, until something must have gone wrong with the compass needle, because it headed toward the shoals, ran aground, broke up, and sank without a single sound, even though a collision against the reefs like that should have produced a crash of metal and the explosion of engines that would have frozen, with fright the soundest‐sleeping dragons in the prehistoric jungle that began with the last streets of the village and ended on the other side of the world, so that he himself thought it was a dream, especially the, next day, when he. saw the radiant fishbowl. of the bay, the disorder of colors of the Negro shacks on the hills above the harbor, the schooners of the smugglers from the Guianas loading their cargoes ‐of innocent parrots whose craws were full of diamonds, he thought, I fell asleep counting the stars and L dreamed about that huge ship, of course, he was so convinced that he didn’t tell anyone nor did he remember the vision again until the same night on the following March when he was looking for the flash of dolphins in the sea and what he found was the illusory line, gloomy, intermittent, with the same mistaken direction as the first time, except that then he was so sure he was awake that he ran to tell his mother and she spent three weeks moaning with disappointment, because your brain’s rotting away from doing so many things backward, sleeping during the day and going out at night like a criminal, and since she had to go to the city around that time to get something comfortable where she could sit and think about her dead husband, because the rockers on her chair had worn out after eleven years of widowhood, she took advantage of the occasion and had the boatman go near the shoals so that her son could see what he really saw in the glass of; the sea, the lovemaking of manta rays in a springtime of sponges, pink snappers and blue corvinas diving into the other wells of softer waters that were there among the waters, and even the wandering hairs of victims of drowning in some colonial shipwreck, no trace of sunken liners of anything like it, and yet he was so pigheaded that his mother promised to watch with him the next March, absolutely, not knowing that the only thing absolute in her future now was an easy chair from the days of Sir Francis Drake which she had bought at an auction in a Turk’s store, in which she sat down to rest that same night sighing, oh, my poor Olofernos, if you could only see how nice it is to think about you on this velvet lining and this brocade from the casket of a queen, but the more she brought back the memory of her dead husband, the more the blood in her heart bubbled up and turned to chocolate, as if instead of sitting down she were running, soaked from chills and fevers and her breathing full of earth, until he returned at dawn and found her dead in the easy chair, still warm, but half rotted away as after a snakebite, the same as happened afterward to four other women before the murderous chair was thrown into the sea, far away where it wouldn’t bring evil to anyone, because it had. been used so much over the centuries that its faculty for giving rest had been used up, and so he had to grow accustomed to his miserable routine of an orphan who was pointed out by everyone as the son of the widow who had brought the throne of misfortune into the village, living not so much from public charity as from fish he stole out of the boats, while his voice was becoming a roar, and not remembering his visions of past times anymore until another night in March when he chanced to look seaward and suddenly, good Lord, there, it is, the huge asbestos whale, the behemoth beast, come see it, he shouted madly, come see it, raising such an uproar of dogs’ barking and women’s panic that even the oldest men remembered the frights of their great‐grandfathers and crawled under their beds, thinking that William Dampier had come back, but those who ran into the street didn’t make the effort to see the unlikely apparatus which at that instant was lost again in the east and raised up in its annual disaster, but they covered him with blows and left him so twisted that it was then he said to himself, drooling with rage, now they’re going to see who I am, but he took care not to share his determination with anyone, but spent the whole year with the fixed idea, now they’re going to see who I am, waiting for it to be the eve of the apparition once more in order to do what he did, which was steal a boat, cross the bay, and spend the evening waiting for his great moment in the inlets of the slave port, in the human brine of the Caribbean, but so absorbed in his adventure that he didn’t stop as he always did in front of the Hindu shops to look at the ivory mandarins carved from the whole tusk of an elephant, nor did he make fun of the Dutch Negroes in their orthopedic velocipedes, nor was he frightened as at other times of the copper‐skinned Malayans, who had gone around the world, enthralled by the chimera of a secret tavern where they sold roast filets of Brazilian women, because he wasn’t aware of anything until night came over him with all the weight of the stars and the jungle exhaled a sweet fragrance of gardenias and rotter salamanders, and there he was, rowing in the stolen boat, toward the mouth of the bay, with the lantern out so as not to alert the customs police, idealized every fifteen seconds by the green wing flap of the beacon and turned human once more by the darkness, knowing that he was getting close to the buoys that marked the harbor, channel, not only because its oppressive glow was getting more intense, but because the breathing of the water was becoming sad, and he rowed like that, so wrapped up in himself, that he. didn’t know where the fearful shark’s breath that suddenly reached him came from or why the night became dense, as if the stars had suddenly died, and it was because the liner was there, with all of its inconceivable size, Lord, bigger than, any other big thing in the world and darker than any other dark thing on land or sea, three hundred thousand tons of shark smell passing so close to the boat that he could see the seams of the steel precipice without a single light in the infinite portholes, without a sigh from the engines, without a soul, and carrying its own circle of silence with it, its own dead air, its halted time, its errant sea in which a whole world of drowned animals floated, and suddenly it all disappeared with the flash of the beacon and for an instant it was the diaphanous Caribbean once more, the March night, the everyday air of the pelicans, so he stayed alone among the buoys, not knowing what to do, asking himself, startled, if perhaps he wasn’t dreaming while he was awake, not just now but the other times too, but no sooner had. he asked himself than a breath of mystery snuffled out the buoys, from the first to the last, so that when the light of the beacon passed by the liner appeared again and now its compasses were out of order, perhaps not even knowing what part of the ocean sea it was in, groping for the invisible channel but actually heading for the shoals, until he got the overwhelming revelation that that misfortune of the buoys was the last key to the enchantment and he lighted the lantern in the boat, a tiny red light that had no reason to alarm anyone in the watch towers but which would be like a guiding sun for the pilot, because, thanks to it, the liner corrected its course and passed into the main gate of the channel in a maneuver of lucky resurrection, and then all the lights went on at the same time so that the boilers wheezed again, the stars were fixed in their places, and the animal corpses went to the bottom, and there was a clatter of plates and a fragrance of laurel sauce in the kitchens, and one could hear the pulsing of the orchestra on the moon decks and the throbbing of the arteries of high‐sea lovers in the shadows of the staterooms, but he still carried so much leftover rage in him that he would not let himself be confused by emotion or be frightened by the miracle, but said to himself with more decision than ever, now they’re going to see who I am, the cowards, now they’re going to see, and instead of turning aside so that the colossal machine would not charge into him he began to row in front of it, because now they really are going to see who I am, and he continued guiding the ship with the lantern until he was so sure of its obedience that he made it change course from the direction of the docks once more, took it out of the invisible channel, and led it by the halter as if it were a sea lamb toward the lights of the sleeping village, a living ship, invulnerable to the torches of the beacon, that no longer made invisible but made it aluminum every fifteen seconds, and the crosses of the church, the misery of the houses, the illusion began to stand out and still the ocean liner followed behind him, following his will inside of it, the captain asleep on his heart side, the fighting bulls in the snow of their pantries, the solitary patient in the infirmary, the orphan water of its cisterns, the unredeemed pilot who must have mistaken the cliffs for the docks, because at that instant the great roar of the whistle burst forth, once, and he with downpour of steam that fell on him, again, and the boat belonging to someone else was on the point of capsizing, and again, but it was too late, because there were the shells of the shoreline, the stones of the street, the doors of the disbelievers, the whole village illuminated by the lights of the fearsome liner itself, and he barely had time to get out of the way to make room for the cataclysm, shouting in the midst of the confusion, there it is, you cowards, a second before the huge steel cask shattered the ground and one could hear the neat destruction of ninety thousand five hundred champagne glasses breaking, one after the other, from stem to stern, and then the light came out and it was no longer a March dawn but the noon of a radiant Wednesday, and he was able to give himself the pleasure of watching the disbelievers as with open mouths they contemplated the largest ocean liner in this world and the other aground in front of the church, whiter than anything, twenty times taller than the steeple and some ninety‐seven times longer than the village, with its name engraved in iron letters, Halalcsillag, and the ancient and languid waters of the sea of death dripping down its sides.”

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14 comments

Excellently written and presented, this is a must have for everyone who loves literature.

I am reminded of an English class in high school wherein our teacher challenged three teams to diagram the first sentence in “You Can Never Go Home Again” by Thomas Wolfe. It runs for over a page and took us two disassembled grocery sacks to complete. We succeeded and the reward was to skip diagramming from then on. Result? The brainier kids were heroes, temporarily, and the class delved into literature. Very clever teacher!

such quote unquote cutey pie teachers ought be shot

Bravo, Ken! May teachers such as you be showered with rewards — such as a living salary.

wow that’s incredible 👏

131 sentence in Blindness:

“The city was hit by an epidemic of “white blindness” which spares no one, everyone who falls victim to it is left with a blank gaze as if sunk in an ocean of milk, this white sickness which had spread through the city like wildfire was more contagious than the common cold although no one knew how it was transmitted and there was no preventative or curative treatment for it, doctors were powerless against it and their waiting rooms were filled with people who bumped into each other, stumbled around, moaned, wept, coughed, blew their noses, groped for handkerchiefs in vain, cursed their fate and that of others, prayed to God or the Devil, wept for their mothers, fathers or children who they could no longer see or hear or touch”

You forgot the 3 pager in “Sound and the Fury” and the big one containing botanical descriptions in “Name of the Rose.”

Dude That Was A Lot Of Words

shut the hell up yall dumb as hell

I now feel better about my 100 word sentence in my novel

how long did that take?!?!?!?!?!?!?!???!?!?!?!?!?

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The Real Story Behind NPR’s Current Problems

Yes, the broadcaster is a mess. but “wokeness” isn’t the issue..

NPR, the great bastion of old-school audio journalism, is a mess. But as someone who loves NPR, built my career there, and once aspired to stay forever, I say with sadness that it has been for a long time.

This might be news to those who tune out the circular firing squad of institutional media whiners. But my former NPR colleague Uri Berliner, one of the organization’s (as of now) senior editors, set off a firestorm by publishing a commentary that essentially blamed “wokeness” and Democratic partisanship for the apparent loss of confidence in the once-unimpeachable institution. (This morning, news broke that Uri has been suspended by NPR for violating a policy about “outside work,” and informed that he’d be fired for any more infractions.) The essay, published by Bari Weiss’ the Free Press, blew up certain corners of X and various Facebook feeds, and was gleefully lapped up by conservatives who’ve been fighting to defund NPR and public broadcasting for a generation.

It was a longtime fear at NPR that some scandal or mess that the network had hoped to contain within its headquarters, lovingly referred to as the “mother ship” by nippers and ex-nippers everywhere, would find its way to the outside world, where the organization’s very real, powerful enemies could exploit it. In fact, this is happening right now; Christopher Rufo, a conservative writer and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has launched a campaign against NPR’s new CEO Katherine Maher, accusing her of liberal bias based on old tweets. Those kinds of threats reinforce an in-the-trenches camaraderie at NPR. It has also been used to quash internal criticism. I guess Uri’s piece proves that that strategy doesn’t work anymore.

Uri started at NPR in 1999. I started in 1997 in the audience research department as an administrative assistant. Because I was what we called “a back-seat baby,” someone who’d grown up being force-fed a steady diet of NPR from car radios and in the home by crunchy granola parents, I had spent the past several months before my college graduation searching the organization’s rudimentary website, desperate to find anything that I was qualified to do. A year later, I maneuvered into the news division as the editorial assistant to senior correspondent Daniel Schorr and one of the “Murrow Boys,” protégés of CBS Radio legend and Good Night, and Good Luck hero Edward R. Murrow.

After a stint at Salon from 1999 to 2001, I landed back at NPR. Everyone did. It was an institutional joke that people who left for other jobs would find their way back, because the place was irresistible. And it kind of was. So many people there were/are brilliant, kind, funny, interesting, and dedicated to public service. Aside from my family, I found most of the people I like, love, and care about while I was working at NPR.

So when Uri’s piece started popping up on my timeline last week, it felt like hearing a loud, ugly family argument break out in the room next door: I wanted to pretend as if it weren’t happening; I wanted people to shut up. But if they were going to shout, I at least wanted them to tell the whole story.

And that story is that NPR has been both a beacon of thoughtful, engaging, and fair journalism for decades, and a rickety organizational shit show for almost as long. If former CEO John Lansing—the big bad of Uri’s piece—failed to fix it, or somehow made it worse, that’s a failure he shared with almost every NPR leader before him. But if, as Uri charges (albeit in a negative way), Lansing genuinely managed to break the network loose from the grasp of self-righteous white liberal identity politics, even in an imperfect way, that would surprise the hell out of me. Especially given the well-reported exodus of top journalists of color, and the loss of a diverse group of journalists during last year’s podcast layoffs .

It did take a kind of courage for Uri to publicly criticize the organization. But it also took a lot of the wrong type of nerve. His argument is a demonstration of contemporary journalism at its worst, in which inconvenient facts and obvious questions were ignored, and the facts that could be shaped to serve the preferred argument were inflated in importance.

Take a step into the way-back machine to 2011, Uri’s so-called golden age. That’s the year when senior members of the development team fell for a scam set up by professional provocateur James O’Keefe . The aftermath took them out and toppled then–CEO and President Vivian Schiller. It came months after the ill-timed, clumsy firing of Juan Williams , which led to senior vice president of news Ellen Weiss resigning under pressure .

Uri also leapfrogs over a long list of contemporary fuckups and questionable calls that could explain the growing public distrust that concerns him. There were questions about NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg’s personal relationship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg compromising her reporting ; the departure of news chief Mike Oreskes , and other prominent men in the newsroom‚ after a wave of sexual harassment charges; the exposure of systematic exploitation of NPR’s temporary workforce . And those are just the public problems.

Behind the scenes and stretching back into the “golden age,” there were major strategic errors that seriously damaged the network’s prospects. The founding producer of The Daily at the New York Times was Theo Balcomb, a senior producer at All Things Considered who couldn’t get enough support to launch a morning news podcast inside NPR. There was the “Flat is the new growth” mantra that reigned for a few years after the network decided that a multimedia future meant shrugging off softness in listener numbers for core shows. Then there was the time in the late aughts when leadership decided that podcasting wasn’t going to amount to much, and so pumped the brakes on early efforts. Though the failure of imagination started earlier; the first big blunder I saw was in the late 1990s, when the network failed to lock in a deal with a little show called This American Life .

Uri’s account of the deliberate effort to undermine Trump up to and after his election is also bewilderingly incomplete, inaccurate, and skewed. For most of 2016, many NPR journalists warned newsroom leadership that we weren’t taking Trump and the possibility of his winning seriously enough. But top editors dismissed the chance of a Trump win repeatedly, declaring that Americans would be revolted by this or that outrageous thing he’d said or done. I remember one editorial meeting where a white newsroom leader said that Trump’s strong poll numbers wouldn’t survive his being exposed as a racist. When a journalist of color asked whether his numbers could be rising because of his racism, the comment was met with silence. In another meeting, I and a couple of other editorial leaders were encouraged to make sure that any coverage of a Trump lie was matched with a story about a lie from Hillary Clinton. Another colleague asked what to do if one candidate just lied more than the other. Another silent response.

I left NPR in the early fall of 2016, but when I came back to work on Morning Edition about a year later, I saw NO trace of the anti-Trump editorial machine that Uri references. On the contrary, people were at pains to find a way to cover Trump’s voters and his administration fairly. We went full-bore on “diner guy in a trucker hat” coverage and adopted the “alt-right” label to describe people who could accurately be called racists. The network had a reflexive need to stay on good terms with people in power, and journalists who had contacts within the administration were encouraged to pursue those bookings.

We regularly set up live interviews with Republican officials and Trump surrogates. But it was tough because NPR always loved guests who would be insightful, honest, and—perhaps above all—polite. There were plenty of people who’d for years fit that description across the partisan divide in official Washington, but they were scarce in the Trump administration. We changed the format of live political interviews, adding what we called a “level-set.” That would be three-ish minutes after a conversation with a political operative or elected official when a host and NPR reporter would try to fact-check what had just been said.

Maybe the biggest head-scratcher for me in Uri’s argument is how it frames the lack of pursuit of the Hunter Biden laptop story as driven exclusively by politics. Uri said there was no follow-through because “the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched.” In fairness, I left NPR for good in the spring of 2020, so I wasn’t there for this story arc. And the inappropriate statement, from a loose-lipped editor, that “it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump” sounds on-brand. But that killer instinct was regularly beat out of NPR journalists, regardless of the political mood or the president.

People pitched good stories in our meetings all the time that were dismissed as insubstantial, or not interesting, or not important enough, only for them to appear days or weeks later in the New York Times or the Washington Post. And only then , NPR leaders would want reporters to jump on it.

There were several reasons why good pitches died. The pitcher wasn’t high enough in the editorial landscape to be taken seriously. The resources were scarce because we were top-heavy and spread thin, trying to cover the country and the world, far beyond electoral politics. We didn’t have enough reporters or the right reporters on whatever beat to cover the story properly. Correspondents, reporters, and desks could be very territorial, and if this one specific reporter wasn’t able to do a story—because they were covering something else, or on leave, or didn’t feel like it—the piece frequently died. If reporting on an issue or story had already been done by an NPR reporter, a pitch could get smothered. That’s even if the original story had been years ago and the facts had changed, because pursuing an update of an old story was frequently framed as some kind of insult to the reporter who’d done it before. Many sharp ideas just hit a wall of silence.

And to be fair, some of that did seem politically motivated, before and after Trump was elected. I remember resistance to covering the violent MS-13 gang after it became a major talking point in Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric—even though the gang was active and murdering people in communities around the D.C. metropolitan area, close to NPR’s headquarters, and just miles from where many staffers lived. I think a lot of critics would consider that “wokeness”: pussyfooting around an issue because it might offend people of color. I saw it as low-key racial bias, because MS-13’s victims were mostly poor Central American immigrants, the kind of people we didn’t think our affluent white listenership would pay attention to.

Race has long been one of those third-rail issues in NPR’s coverage. I was part of the Code Switch team, beginning in August 2014, around the time that Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. The Code Switch unit had been birthed in one of those fits of diversity enthusiasm that have dotted the organization’s timeline from my first years there. The unit started in 2013, in the age of Obama, and focused mainly on blogging about race and the intersection with culture. But that changed when the network shut down Tell Me More with Michel Martin, a show that made covering race a priority, and one that I worked on from its first weeks until the bitter end. Code Switch stepped into the gap, with strong but soul-crushing coverage of police brutality , racist violence , protests, and civil unrest .

NPR did excellent work in covering those stories, including Michel—who is a mentor and dear friend to me—leading a community forum from Missouri, and great investigative reporting on a culture of corruption in Ferguson that led to overpolicing of Black residents.

Some listeners rightly pointed out that police killed white people too, and often under shady circumstances. When I suggested that we pursue it as a story, I got crickets. When video emerged of a cop shooting white teenager Zachary Hammond during a drug sting operation, I couldn’t get our leadership to green-light reporting on it. Code Switch was the only unit that went to air with something on Hammond’s death. I think that’s because it would have complicated—or acknowledged the complication—of a story where we could smugly position ourselves as on the “right” side.

And that’s what the core editorial problem at NPR is and, frankly, has long been: an abundance of caution that often crossed the border to cowardice. NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planting a flag there, and calling it objectivity. That would more than explain the lack of follow-up on Hunter Biden’s laptop and the lab-leak theory, going full white guilt after George Floyd’s murder, and shifting to indignant white impatience with racial justice now.

Layers of complex relationships made genuine editorial criticism hazardous at NPR. Even in an industry in which office romances happen a lot, NPR has been exceptional, boasting dozens of “met and married” couples. And that doesn’t cover all the quiet couples, besties, and other personal entanglements. All this means that if you criticized someone’s editorial decisions in a meeting, their best friend, sweetheart, or ex might be glowering at you from across the table. Even a mild critique could be met with: You know John’s been having a hard time because his dad just died/wife just left him/kid is having problems. Give him a break. Lots of people who were in relationships with colleagues kept it out of their work, but enough did not that it contributed to a culture where whisper networks replaced open discussion.

Given all that, I have to acknowledge that I understand how Uri could’ve been honestly mistaken in reaching some of his conclusions. Another chronic organizational struggle at NPR is stove-piping. Your experience could be completely different from that of someone working right across the hall from you, depending on the team you worked with and the meetings you went to. I was lucky, and (mostly) played my cards right during my years there. I landed with great groups of journalists who nurtured my talents and helped me address my flaws. I loved the place and for years defended it from charges of bias, even when my friends were victims of it. I completely bought the “bad apples” version of NPR’s long-standing issues with racism and sexism.

I leaned on the positive, and the belief that NPR was great and could be better. So I was a part of a lot of the “Let’s make this diversity thing work” efforts that rankled Uri. I remember leading one session he attended, when he spoke out to insist that NPR’s diversity problem had a lot to do with issues beyond race, like class, region, education, and political perspective. He was right, and I told him so.

But maybe the stove-piping meant that Uri didn’t see the pattern in those efforts that started wearing my spirit down. Some big news in the world or an internal failure would spark a wave of carefully stage-managed soul-searching from leadership, and ad hoc committees of well-intentioned volunteers would be assembled to write lists of recommendations. Then those recommendations would be politely received, filed away, and forgotten. And two or three years later, some new crisis would start the cycle all over again. In my experience, those multihyphenate identity groups or task forces were disproportionately full of junior staffers. Because many veterans—except for true-believing tryhards like me—understood that they were a waste of time.

One of the moments that sealed my decision to leave NPR was a conversation with my colleague and friend Keith Woods , NPR’s chief diversity officer. I was struck by a profound sense of déjà vu, not just about the stubborn challenge of diversifying NPR’s coverage. I felt that he and I were repeating—word for word, beat for beat—a discussion about source diversity that we’d had in the exact same room years before.

By that time, my rose-colored glasses and NPR-fueled sense of my own superior powers of understanding had already taken a severe beating. I had thought highly of all the men who were later felled by the sexual harassment scandal and had unwittingly recommended some of them as mentors to young journalists. I discovered that Mike Oreskes—someone whom I trusted and who was critical in helping me get back into NPR in 2017—had even harassed one of the women I encouraged to seek him out for career advice. I was stunned in the management-level meetings and conversations where harassment victims were disparaged as troublemakers, and harassers who were still with the company were protected.

I so loved the version of NPR that I had experienced and had amplified in my imagination that I was slow to see the cruelty being done to people I worked with and cared about. Because of my reputation in the system, I had become a magnet for young public radio journalists across the country who wanted to share their stories of being sexually or racially harassed, underpaid, or bullied, and ask for my advice. I lost track of how many of these calls I got, or how many discreet coffeehouse chats revealed a new story of abuse. I remember at least three people who told me some version of “It’s OK. I don’t think about killing myself anymore.” For what it’s worth, two of those were young white journalists. When I reached out to talk with a wise NPR connected elder about it, her advice was to stop taking those calls. Pretend that I didn’t know the facts, because they challenged the narrative about who we were, and how my hubris had contributed to it.

I guess that’s why I think Uri is most wrong about NPR’s relationship with the rest of the country. It’s a very accurate reflection of America right now, a place where people won’t admit that good intentions don’t always yield good results, and would rather hide behind the myth of its excellence than do the hard work of making it a reality. I sincerely hope there’s still time to turn it around.

The Old New Thing

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From NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher: Thoughts on our mission and our work

The message below was sent by NPR's President and CEO to all staff:

This has been a long week. I'll apologize in advance for the length of this note, and for it being the first way so many of you hear from me on more substantive issues. Thanks for bearing with me, as there's a lot that should be said.

I joined this organization because public media is essential for an informed public. At its best, our work can help shape and illuminate the very sense of what it means to have a shared public identity as fellow Americans in this sprawling and enduringly complex nation.

NPR's service to this aspirational mission was called in question this week, in two distinct ways. The first was a critique of the quality of our editorial process and the integrity of our journalists. The second was a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are.

Asking a question about whether we're living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions. Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.

It is deeply simplistic to assert that the diversity of America can be reduced to any particular set of beliefs, and faulty reasoning to infer that identity is determinative of one's thoughts or political leanings. Each of our colleagues are here because they are excellent, accomplished professionals with an intense commitment to our work: we are stronger because of the work we do together, and we owe each other our utmost respect. We fulfill our mission best when we look and sound like the country we serve.

NPR has some of the finest reporters, editors, and producers in journalism. Our reporting and programming is not only consistently recognized and rewarded for its quality, depth, and nuance; but at its best, it makes a profound difference in people's lives. Parents, patients, veterans, students, and so many more have directly benefited from the impact of our journalism. People come to work here because they want to report, and report deeply, in service to an informed public, and to do work that makes a difference.

This is the work of our people, and our people represent America, our irreducibly complex nation. Given the very real challenges of covering the myriad perspectives, motivations, and interests of a nation of more than 330 million very different people, we succeed through our diversity. This is a bedrock institutional commitment, hard-won, and hard-protected.

We recognize that this work is a public trust, one established by Congress more than 50 years ago with the creation of the public broadcasting system. In order to hold that trust, we owe it our continued, rigorous accountability. When we are asked questions about who we serve and how that influences our editorial choices, we should be prepared to respond. It takes great strength to be comfortable with turning the eye of journalistic accountability inwards, but we are a news organization built on a foundation of robust editorial standards and practices, well-constructed to withstand the hardest of gazes.

It is true that our audiences have unquestionably changed over the course of the past two decades. There is much to be proud of here: through difficult, focused work, we have earned new trust from younger, more diverse audiences, particularly in our digital experiences. These audiences constitute new generations of listeners, are more representative of America, and our changing patterns of listening, viewing, and reading.

At the same time, we've seen some concerning changes: the diffusion of drivetime, an audience skewing further away in age from the general population, and significant changes in political affiliations have all been reflected in the changing composition of our broadcast radio audiences. Of course, some of these changes are representative of trends outside our control — but we owe it to our mission and public interest mandate to ask, what levers do we hold?

A common quality of exceptional organizations is humility and the ability to learn. We owe it to our public interest mandate to ask ourselves: could we serve more people, from broader audiences across America? Years ago we began asking this question as part of our North Star work to earn the trust of new audiences. And more recently, this is why the organization has taken up the call of audience data, awareness, and research: so we can better understand who we are serving, and who we are not.

Our initial research has shown that curiosity is the unifying throughline for people who enjoy NPR's journalism and programming. Curiosity to know more, to learn, to experience, to change. This is a compelling insight, as curiosity only further expands the universe of who we might serve. It's a cross-cutting trait, pretty universal to all people, and found in just about every demographic in every part of the nation.

As an organization, we must invest in the resources that will allow us to be as curious as the audiences we serve, and expand our efforts to understand how to serve our nation better. We recently completed in-depth qualitative research with a wide range of listeners across the country, learning in detail what they think about NPR and how they view our journalism. Over the next two years we plan to conduct audience research across our entire portfolio of programming, in order to give ourselves the insight we need to extend the depth and breadth of our service to the American public.

It is also essential that we listen closely to the insights and experiences of our colleagues at our 248 Member organizations. Their presence across America is foundational to our mission: serving and engaging audiences that are as diverse as our nation: urban and rural, liberal and conservative, rich and poor, often together in one community.

We will begin by implementing an idea that has been proposed for some time: establishing quarterly NPR Network-wide editorial planning and review meetings, as a complement to our other channels for Member station engagement. These will serve as a venue for NPR newsroom leadership to hear directly from Member organization editorial leaders on how our journalism serves the needs of audiences in their communities, and a coordination mechanism for Network-wide editorial planning and newsgathering. We're starting right away: next week we plan to invite Members to join us for an initial scoping conversation.

And in the spirit of learning from our own work, we will introduce regular opportunities to connect what our research is telling us about our audiences to the practical application of how we're serving them. As part of the ongoing unification of our Content division, Interim Chief Content Officer, Edith Chapin, will establish a broad-based, rotating group that will meet monthly to review our coverage across all platforms. Some professions call this a retro, a braintrust, a 'crit,' or tuning session — this is an opportunity to take a break from the relentless pressure of the clock in order to reflect on how we're meeting our mandate, what we're catching and what we're missing, and learn from our colleagues in a climate of respectful, open-minded discussion.

The spirit of our founding newsroom and network was one of experimentation, creativity, and direct connection with our listeners across America. Our values are a direct outgrowth of this moment: the independence of a public trust, the responsibility to capture the voice and spirit of a nation, a willingness to push boundaries to tell the stories that matter. We're no strangers to change, continuously evolving as our network has grown, our programming has expanded, and our audiences have diversified — and as we look to a strategy that captures these values and opportunities, the future holds more change yet.

Two final thoughts on our mission:

I once heard missions like ours described as asymptotic — we can see our destination and we strive for it, but may never fully meet it. The value is in the continued effort: the challenge stretches on toward infinity and we follow, ever closer. Some people might find that exhausting. I suspect they don't work here. I suspect that you do because you find that challenge a means to constantly renew your work, and to reinfuse our mission with meaning as our audiences and world continues to change.

The strongest, most effective, and enduring missions are those that are owned far beyond the walls of their institution. Our staff, our Member stations, our donors, our listeners and readers, our ardent fans, even our loyal opposition all have a part to play: each of us come to the work because we believe in it, even as we each may have different perspectives on how we succeed. Every person I have met so far in my three weeks here has shown me how they live our mission every day, in their work and in their contributions to the community.

Continuing to uphold our excellence with confidence, having inclusive conversations that bridge perspectives, and learning more about the audiences we serve in order to continue to grow and thrive, adding more light to the illumination of who we are as a shared body public: I look forward to how we will do this work together.