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Irène Némirovsky

Deep within everyone’s heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside ordinary life. She is intoxicated. She feels as if she exists beyond time, beyond its laws; she experiences not the… Continue reading Irène Némirovsky

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Michel Houellebecq

There will be difficult days and timesAnd nights of suffering that seem insurmountableWhere we cry stupidly with our arms on the tableWhere suspended life hangs by a thread;My love I sense you walking in the city. — Michel Houellebecq, from “Last Times,” Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013; A Bilingual Edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)

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Gustaf Sobin

[He] spent long stretches of summer with his beloved. In dream after dream, they’d meet, embrace, and—talking in an animated rush—pass hours, sometimes days, in each other’s company. Even if the dreams only lasted, in actual fact, a matter of minutes, they appeared as if suspended in a time frame entirely their own. In protracted… Continue reading Gustaf Sobin

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Arthur Rimbaud

A Dream for Winter In the winter, we shall travel in a little pink railway carriageWith blue cushions.We shall be comfortable. A nest of mad kisses lies in waitIn each soft corner. You will close your eyes, so as not to see, through the glass,The evening shadows pulling faces.Those snarling monsters, a populationOf black devils… Continue reading Arthur Rimbaud

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