D. A. Hosek

Category: writing

  • Beautiful Sentences: Genevieve Valentine

    Of course, like most unkind advice, it was correct, eventually, somehow. Genevieve Valentine, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Sigrid Nunez

    In the news: Thirty-two million adult Americans can’t read. The potential audience for poetry has shrunk by two-thirds since 1992. A “rent-burdened” woman worrying how she’s going to survive in New York City decides to try writing a novel (“and that’s going well”). Sigrid Nunez, The Friend.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Tommy Orange

    She presses the Home button and for a second, just for a small moment, thinks she should open her other Facebook feed. On that other Facebook, she’d find the information and media she’d always been looking for. On that other Facebook feed, she’d find true connection. That is where she’d always wanted to be. Is…

  • Writerly resolutions, May status

    I made significant progress on the novel (the graph at the right shows the progression of my word count over the month). A first draft of chapter 11 is done and I’m nearly finished with the rewrite of the chapter. I think that this might be a chapter that can stand on its own as a…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Sigrid Nunez

    If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away. Sigrid Nunez, The Friend.

  • “Persistence of Memory”: The Story Behind the Story

    “Persistence of Memory” has its origins in a visit to the Salvador Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, Florida. During a tour of the exhibits, there was a painting from the same series as Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory” and the guide said that this was about Dalí attempting to portray time flattening to a single…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Tommy Orange

    Those hills bend time. Tommy Orange, There There.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Emily Banks

    We close our own dead’s eyes so we can’t seethis pupilless despair, the final begging prayersof a godless animal. Emily Banks, “Thaw.”

  • Beautiful Sentences: Fernando Pessoa

    And I smile to myself as I think that life, which includes these pages bearing the names of fabrics and various sums of money, blank spaces, ruled lines and letters, also includes the great navigators, the great saints, the poets of every age, none of whom appear in this book, a whole vast progeny excluded…