D. A. Hosek

Just another writer

  • Beautiful Sentences: William Faulkner

    I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality…

  • Beautiful Sentences: Elie Wiesel

    What if they tried to play tricks with your memory in order to attack the thing it protects—your soul? Elie Wiesel, The Judges.

  • Beautiful Sentences: Maria Semple

    This is why you must love life: one day you’re offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you’re using the word calve as a verb. Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 439.1 WEX Just Say Nu : Yiddish For Every Occasion (When English Just Won’t Do)

    As I continue through the 400s, I also strive to avoid having to learn another language. The 430s are German and Germanic languages and I decide on this book,  hich looks like it might not be a real learn Yiddish book to check off this decade. It turns out that Wex has written something that’s a…

  • 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,…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 422 RIC How Happy Became Homosexual : And Other Mysterious Semantic Shifts

    As I get into the 420s the books are now shelved in the foreign language section. The 420s are the English language and most of what’s hear are books for ESL learners, so the pickings are slim. I spot this book and the title catches my attention, I’m curious about the transition of the meaning…

  • 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:…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 417.7 MCW The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language

    I continue to circle towards the foreign language shelves, but there’s still some space left in the Dewey Decimal system before I get there. The 410s are linguistics, pretty much indistinguishable by the collection at the local library from the 400s, language. From there I selected this book, caught by the punning title. Like Harrison…