Bowls of coffee and Mona Awad's stunning, sparkling, heartbreaking prose keeping me company in Québec.

Leopoldine Core's stories are stark and lonely and lovely. Devouring this gorgeous collection.

"The sun spiked through the trees, like always— the drowsy willows, the hot wind fussing over the picnic blankets— but the familiarity of the day was disturbed by the path the girls cut across the regular world. Sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water."

Ocean Vuong's stunning, fierce, vulnerable and mesmerizing collection is breaking my heart.

"I wasn't a child for long, and after I wasn't, I was something else. I was this. And that. A blast furnace, a steel maze inside, the low-level engine room of an ocean liner." - Mary Jo Bang in The Paris Review 216, Spring 2016

This book is destroying me. Currently making the same facial expression as the man on the cover.

My morning coffee companion

"The loudspeaker will emit a disembodied human breath. Things will never be the same, it will say, as if she needs to be told this. As if she doesn't know the instability of a tall tower, a city's hunger for ruin. As if this weren't what she came for."

"I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond."

"The dead live on in the homeliest of ways. They're listed in the phone book. They get mail. Their wigs rest on Styrofoam heads at the back of closets. Their beds are made. Their shoes are everywhere."

"and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it's hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow." -Ada Limón #brightdeadthings