D. A. Hosek

Category: writing

  • Beautiful Sentences: Keith Ridgway

    She liked art. She liked paintings and video art and photography. She liked to read about artists and she liked to hear them talk. She had been to all the big London art museums already, and she had been to some small ones too, and some galleries. She wanted to be an artist, she thought,…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Yiyun Li

    Instead, we read other people’s stories, more real than our own; after all, inadequate makers of our own lives, we were no match for those masters. Yiyun Li, “Kindness.”

  • Beautiful Sentences: Steven Millhauser

    One explanation says that we ourselves are phantoms. Arguments drawn from cognitive science claim that our bodies are nothing but artificial constructs of our brains: we are the dream-creations of electrically charged neurons. The world itself is a great seeming. One virtue of this explanation is that it accounts for the behavior of our phantoms:…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Yiyun Li

    You think you will remember every moment, every detail, but the truth is I can’t remember much about it. Can’t even remember how long we were at it. Yiyun Li, “Kindness.”

  • Beautiful Sentences: Christine Sneed

    Rejection is the relentless, powerful hazing that disables ninety-seven out of a hundred talented people. Christine Sneed, “The First Wife.”

  • Beautiful Sentences: J. Robert Lennon

    The memories this act stirred up were mostly memories of other visits to this cemetery, when her feelings had been more profound. (This is what happens, she supposes, to dramatic events: they create feelings that create other feelings, memories that give way to memories of having them. The older you get, the more life seems…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Marilynne Robinson

    You can hate thoughts. That‘s interesting. I hate most of my thoughts. Marilynne Robinson, Home.

  • “Bartholomew L. Bartholomew”: The Story Behind the Story

    “I once held the position of Technical Lead…” this part of the story is autobiography. The rest, modulo the occasional detail that I borrowed from my years’ experience in tech, is fiction. The obvious inspiration is Melville (the short title I used for filenames and the like for the story was “Bart LB” and I…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Denis Johnson

    But I was afraid to make love to her without the conversations and laughter from that false universe playing in our ears, because I didn’t want to get to know her very well, and didn’t want, to be bridging any silences with our eyes. Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son