D. A. Hosek

Category: writing

  • Beautiful Sentences: Ron Hansen

    I see no possible reasons for it. Is it so Mariette Baptiste will be praised and esteemed by the pious? Or is it so she shall be humiliated and jeered at by skeptics? Is it to honor religion or to humble science? And what are these horrible wounds, really? A trick of anatomy, a bleeding…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Muriel Spark

    That spring Jenny’s mother was expecting a baby, there was no rain worth remembering, the grass, the sun and the birds lost their self-centred winter mood and began to think of others. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Ron Hansen

    Cold and calm under mackerel skies that pink in the sunset. Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Penelope Fitzgerald

    Language refers only to itself, it is not the key to anything higher. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Ron Hansen

    When Jesus washed Saint Peter’s feet it was surely a lesson in humility for his apostle, not for himself. We do not like to be done for. Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy.

  • Beautiful Sentences: John Scalzi

    If you could go back, why would you make the same choices? You already lived that life. John Scalzi, Old Man’s War.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Ron Hansen

    Wild sleep has tossed aside the gray wool blanket and sheet and twisted her nightgown on her body so that it seems shameless and slatternly. A great gush of blond hair veils her pillow. Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy.

  • Beautiful Sentences: David Gilbert

    I knew it was heading toward a dark place, but the way he twists the reader into being an accomplice, like you’re the voice in Edgar Mead’s head, that was pretty cool, like the reader affects what’s being read, kind of a Schrödinger’s cat-and-mouse game. David Gilbert, & Sons.

  • 2017 in rejections (and acceptances)

    I’ve upped my submissions a bit from last year, but still below last year. Once again, I fell short of my goal of 200 rejections, but came closer than last year with 160 vs 144. I did manage to set a couple records with my highest ever acceptance rate (4.2%, up from last year’s previous…