Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

An ongoing digital archive of 1,410 items (and counting) proving that I read, I saw, and I actually paid attention.

Collection

Fiction

  • The Door

    The Door

    by Magda SzabĂł

    “I know now, what I didn’t then, that affection can’t always be expressed in calm, orderly, articulate ways; and that one cannot prescribe the form it should take for anyone else.”

  • A Month in the Country

    A Month in the Country

    by J.L. Carr

    “We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.”

  • Giovanni’s Room

    Giovanni’s Room

    by James Baldwin

    “Ça ne manque pas, les chambres. The world is full of rooms— big rooms, little rooms, round rooms, square ones, rooms high up, rooms low down—all kinds of rooms! What kind of room do you think Giovanni should be living in? How long do you think it took me to find the room I have? And since when, since when”—he stopped and beat with his forefinger on my chest—“have you so hated the room? Since when? Since yesterday, since always? Dis-moi.”

  • My Lover, the Rabbi

    My Lover, the Rabbi

    By Wayne Koestenbaum

    “The rabbi, my lover, is back from Warsaw, so my concentration and self-esteem are destroyed. I wrote mythological poems in ninth grade, and the myth my lover resembles is Orpheus—not that I revere Orpheus, I think Orpheus was a failure and a turncoat, I prefer Abraham for being a semi-literalist about God’s commands. The real heartthrob is Isaac, who, if he were alive now and living in Hoboken or in this tiny town near Hoboken, a town I am devastated to admit is my permanent address, would wear studious gold-framed glasses and would have an unfashionable halo of disordered and frizzy curls; he would play the oboe and be constantly licking and biting and polishing his reeds; and he would treat me disrespectfully.”

  • The Invention of Morel

    The Invention of Morel

    by Adolfo Bioy Casares

    “The habits of our lives makes us presume that things will happen in a certain foreseeable way, that there will be a vague coherence in the world.”

  • The City and the Pillar

    The City and the Pillar

    by Gore Vidal

    “Of course his dust would be absorbed in other living things and to that degree at least he would exist again, though it was plain enough that the specific combination which was he would never exist again.”

  • The Novices of Lerna

    The Novices of Lerna

    by Ángel Bonomini

    “The path of the people is a backward path that goes forward, in a time that comes from the future and will end in the past, because the time of our countrymen more than path is time, and more than time is path.”

  • Bright Lights, Big City

    Bright Lights, Big City

    by Jay McInerney

    “But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name.”

  • The Edwardians

    The Edwardians

    by Vita Sackville-West

    “‘Since one cannot have truth,’ cried Sebastian, struggling into his evening shirt, ‘let us at least have good manners.’”

  • Perfection

    Perfection

    by Vincenzo Latronico (translated by Sophie Hughes)

    “Anna and Tom had grown up with the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating.”

  • Killing Stella

    Killing Stella

    by Marlen Haushofer (translated by Shaun Whiteside)

    “The act of salvation is never performed, because anyone with the strength to carry it out is unaware that they must do it, and the knowing person is incapable of action.”

  • Our Evenings

    Our Evenings

    by Alan Hollinghurst

    “Sometimes it is the evidence, the spectacle of another person’s grief that harrows you, more than the loss itself.”

  • The Bar at Twilight

    The Bar at Twilight

    by Frederic Tuten

    “Is this the bar for horses or have I come to the wrong place?”

  • Entitlement

    Entitlement

    by Rumaan Alam

    “The thing that makes life interesting is that it ends. The thing that makes love worthwhile is that it’s all we’ve got.”

  • French Exit

    French Exit

    by Patrick deWitt

    “Do you know what a clichĂ© is? It’s a story so fine and thrilling that it’s grown old in its hopeful retelling.”

  • Cassandra at the Wedding

    Cassandra at the Wedding

    by Dorothy Baker

    “You want to know what my doctor said the first time she saw it? Yes you do. She said everything about it gives evidence of an informed taste. That’s a quote.”

  • A Single Man

    A Single Man

    by Christopher Isherwood

    “But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until—later of sooner—perhaps—no, not perhaps—quite certainly: it will come.”

  • Summer Crossing

    Summer Crossing

    by Truman Capote

    “Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.”

  • Answered Prayers

    Answered Prayers

    by Truman Capote

    “Most secrets should never be told, but especially those that are more menacing to the listener than to the teller.”

  • Hotel Splendide

    Hotel Splendide

    by Ludwig Bemelmans

    “It’s always wonderful when something altogether wrong ends right, without the help of either religion or the police.”