MARY-BETH

An excerpt from the novel Whidbey by T Kira Madden

HERE WAS RELIEF, to Mary-Beth, in planning her only child’s funeral. She felt guilty for the feeling. To plan a funeral meant to admit defeat, Calvin’s defeat and hers too, both of them squashed out at last not only by Tommy but the girls, and the Pigs, and Ronald Lee Book, Unofficial Mayoral Douchebag of Miami, and the teachers and parole officers and correctional officers and social workers and Your Honors, and the system of selective lifeboats (MONEY! It’s always the money!), and the cuntish polo-shirted neighbors who’d kicked Calvin like a Hacky Sack from place to place, who’d painted LUCIFER/AURORA on Mary-Beth’s Burbank Blue door, and Syl’s I told you sos, and Cal’s episode of Cops, and the snitch therapists, the whole world it felt like most usually, and of course, Mary-Beth would not leave out the person who’d run over her son.

Five times, forward and back.

The steps of planning a funeral transformed the taut pain of her chest into something coherent, productive. She remembered Calvin telling her the universe was always expanding, like a strip of dulled elastic, a rubber band at the bottom of her junk drawer. One day, without warning—Calvin had said—it would all snap. That’s how this death pain felt, a rubber band stretched beneath the bones of Mary-Beth’s feet, then secured at the top of her skull where headaches came on. She was an overblown balloon animal, skin thinning, and though her whole life had been spent waiting, she knew now, without Calvin, that annihilating snap might arrive sooner. There was some relief there, too.

Detective Carmen Durham hadn’t called Mary-Beth since she identified the body one week ago. Nobody had called her. There was no police unit left in the town nearest Gateway, the station boarded up for years (only Luckens selling bootleg T-Mobiles outside the station’s old door), so they were outsourcing the investigation to other units now. That’s what Syl said.

Ordering the finger foods, choosing a picture of Calvin for the program, selecting a nice and respectable place for a funeral—these tasks felt easier. Soothing, almost. These tasks were, simply, something Mary-Beth could do. For days Syl brought her the options—Deerfield or Palmetto or Broward, Pastor James or Pastor Finley, how many speeches, what songs—and Mary-Beth would close her eyes and picture it before offering an answer.

Syl had moved into Mary-Beth’s bedroom, Mary-Beth in the living room. This was on Mary-Beth’s insistence. She was more comfortable on her couch, ashtray one reach down, whorls of the TV glow reflecting in her special glass, upside-down little people in there, lulling her to sleep.

In the week since her arrival, Syl had begun to stink up the house, and Mary-Beth told her so. It always smelled like something now, someone else—those Indian meals from the fancy row of the Publix freezer, cloudberry angel wing perfume, lemon bug repellent, the LA Looks hair gel that farted out the bottle and into Syl’s palms. That, and all of Syl’s shoes and clothes smelled like horse shit, no matter how often Syl said that shit was just grass and grain, molasses concentrated, it was still shit. Mary-Beth hated living in grief with those smells.

Syl always hiked the AC way down on account of her hot flashes, which slicked the tile too cold. Mary-Beth had to wear her North Pole elf clothes around the house, those green and red stripes, bundled. When Syl needed formal paperwork signed, Mary-Beth would take the whole operation out the sliding glass doors to the back lawn, remove a few layers of clothing, then scribble her name a million times on the dimpled glass table. She sucked her orange baby food pouches—her toothaches worsening by the day. She wiped Misty ashes from the pages, leaving gray smears and tiny burns on words she could read but not understand. What casket? What wood? What money? The papers crinkle-shrunk in the humid air. July wrapped her body and squeezed. 

Mary-Beth’s yard dipped down to the communal lake. Encircling it: identical condos like a roll of Smarties, and a few gators spread out on the shoreline sunbathing at all hours, iridescent in stillness, even at night. The Lakeness Monster she used to call each gator when Calvin was little. Back then they’d lived in Dade County on a different canal, but still—those goddamn gators. She dreamed constantly of Calvin’s legs and little feet dangling from the open jaw, then disappearing under a body of black water. Never get too close to sitting water, she’d said to Cal. Never make eye contact. And if the monster comes at you, throw your arms up, make yourself big, and run a zigzag fast as you can.

The zigzag thing. Thinking of it now, she wasn’t sure where she’d heard it, if it were ever even true.

More: Guernica

Jack Kerouac’s Posthumous Sales

 

On March 12, 2026, which would have been Jack Kerouac’s 104th birthday, the On the Road scroll sold at auction at Christie’s in New York for a whopping $12,135,000.

Read more: Jack Kerouac’s Record-Breaking Manuscripts 

The Town Where The Last Picture Show Was Filmed Absolutely Hated It

Larry McMurtry’s 1966 coming-of-age novel The Last Picture Show was adapted into a film with a screenplay written by McMurtry and director Peter Bogdanovich. The book was filmed in Archer City, Texas, McMurtry’s hometown. The residents took issue with the way the town was represented in the film.

Like many artists with uneven careers, Peter Bogdanovich learned to keep his distance from reviews, especially bad reviews. “My analogy is, if somebody’s shooting at you, you don’t really want to raise your head to see what kind of gun they’re using,” he explained. But Picture Show was always an exception, and he could quote from the reviews, accurately, fifty years later. It’s possible that the movie received better notices than any American film between Gone with the Wind and The Godfather. As Pauline Kael observed in The New Yorker, “Bogdanovich has made a film for everybody—not just the Airport audience but the youth audience and the educated older audience, too.”

The review Peter would take with him to his grave appeared in Newsweek: “The Last Picture Show is a masterpiece. It is not merely the best American movie of a rather dreary year; it is the most impressive work by a young American director since Citizen Kane.”

To be compared to his idol, his mentor, his friend, in whose own movie Peter was at the moment playing a role, with the character based on Peter himself—a career, a life, doesn’t get any better than this. In February 1972, the movie opened in the big Texas cities as well as Wichita Falls. The battle lines were quickly drawn. “It doesn’t matter to me what people in Archer City think about it,” Larry said, speaking of the town where the movie was shot. He added that he didn’t have many fans there. Gene Bynum, minister of the First Baptist Church in Archer City, told a reporter he had not seen the movie and did not plan to, “but several people have told me about the lewdness, nude scenes and that it is filled from one end to the other with curse words.”

John R. Adams was probably the most upset about the movie. He was the principal of the high school, and he felt properly hoodwinked when the movie appeared with a coarser script than the one Peter had used to gain admittance to the classrooms. “The producers of the film told everybody in town The Last Picture Show was going to be a family movie about small town life,” Adams fumed. “They said they would not be filming the dirty parts of the book, that the picture’s worst possible rating would be GP,” which basically meant suitable for everyone except little kids. In fact, for a while it was supposed to get an X rating, which would have severely limited its commercial viability. The tentative decision was appealed, and the movie got an R instead.

Read More: Literary Hub

A Society - Virginia Woolf

In this short story by Virginia Woolf a group of girls vow that none of them will marry or have children until they can determine what men have been doing all the this time and whether it was worth it for women to spend their youth in bearing an raising them.

This is how it all came about. Six or seven of us were sitting one day after tea. Some were gazing across the street into the windows of a milliner’s shop where the light still shone brightly upon scarlet feathers and golden slippers. Others were idly occupied in building little towers of sugar upon the edge of the tea tray. After a time, so far as I can remember, we drew round the fire and began as usual to praise men—how strong, how noble, how brilliant, how courageous, how beautiful they were—how we envied those who by hook or by crook managed to get attached to one for life—when Poll, who had said nothing, burst into tears. Poll, I must tell you, has always been queer. For one thing her father was a strange man. He left her a fortune in his will, but on condition that she read all the books in the London Library. We comforted her as best we could; but we knew in our hearts how vain it was. For though we like her, Poll is no beauty; leaves her shoe laces untied; and must have been thinking, while we praised men, that not one of them would ever wish to marry her. At last she dried her tears. For some time we could make nothing of what she said. Strange enough it was in all conscience. She told us that, as we knew, she spent most of her time in the London Library, reading. She had begun, she said, with English literature on the top floor; and was steadily working her way down to The Times on the bottom. And now half, or perhaps only a quarter, way through a terrible thing had happened. She could read no more. Books were not what we thought them. ‘Books’ she cried, rising to her feet and speaking with an intensity of desolation which I shall never forget, ‘are for the most part unutterably bad!’

Of course we cried out that Shakespeare wrote books, and Milton and Shelley.

‘Oh yes,’ she interrupted us. ‘You’ve been well taught, I can see. But you are not members of the London Library.’ Here her sobs broke forth anew. At length, recovering a little, she opened one of the pile of books which she always carried about with her—‘From a Window’ or ‘In a Garden’ or some such name as that it was called, and it was written by a man called Benton or Henson or something of that kind. She read the first few pages. We listened in silence. ‘But that’s not a book,’ someone said. So she chose another. This time it was a history, but I have forgotten the writer’s name. Our trepidation increased as she went on. Not a word of it seemed to be true, and the style in which it was written was execrable.

‘Poetry! Poetry!’ we cried, impatiently. ‘Read us poetry!’ I cannot describe the desolation which fell upon us as she opened a little volume and mouthed out the verbose, sentimental foolery which it contained.

‘It must have been written by a woman’ one of us urged. But no. She told us that it was written by a young man, one of the most famous poets of the day. I leave you to imagine what the shock of the discovery was. Though we all cried and begged her to read no more she persisted and read us extracts from the Lives of the Lord Chancellors. When she had finished, Jane, the eldest and wisest of us, rose to her feet and said that she for one was not convinced.

‘Why’ she asked ‘if men write such rubbish as this, should our mothers have wasted their youth in bringing them into the world?We were all silent; and in the silence, poor Poll could be heard sobbing out, ‘Why, why did my father teach me to read?’

Clorinda was the first to come to her senses. ‘It’s all our fault’ she said. ‘Every one of us knows how to read. But no one, save Poll, has ever taken the trouble to do it. I, for one, have taken it for granted that it was a woman’s duty to spend her youth in bearing children. I venerated my mother for bearing ten; still more my grandmother for bearing fifteen; it was, I confess, my own ambition to bear twenty. We have gone on all these ages supposing that men were equally industrious, and that their works were of equal merit. While we have borne the children, they, we supposed, have borne the books and the pictures. We have populated the world. They have civilized it. But now that we can read, what prevents us from judging the results? Before we bring another child into the world we must swear that we will find out what the world is like.’

So we made ourselves into a society for asking questions. One of us was to visit a man-of-war; another was to hide herself in a scholar’s study; another was to attend a meeting of business men; while all were to read books, look at pictures, go to concerts, keep our eyes open in the streets; and ask questions perpetually. We were very young. You can judge of our simplicity when I tell you that before parting that night we agreed that the objects of life were to produce good people and good books. Our questions were to be directed to finding out how far these objects were now attained by men. We vowed solemnly that we would not bear a single child until we were satisfied.

Read More: Biblioklept 

Babe In The Woods or The Art Of Getting Lost - a graphic novel by Julie Heffernan

 

Babe in the Woods, or the Art of Getting Lost, is Julie Heffernan’s first graphic novel, published by Algonquin Books.  In the book, a young artist named Julie, on a hike with her infant son, takes a wrong turn and finds herself on an extraordinary journey through her tangled past. It looks fabulous.

“One summer day, a young artist with a newborn—sleep-deprived, desperate to escape her hot, cramped apartment and her oblivious husband—sets off on a hike in the country with her baby boy, Sam, strapped to her front and her senses fully attuned to the colors, the sounds, and the flora and fauna in the woods around her. During her journey, Julie reflects on her childhood, her parents, her marriage, and her path to becoming a painter. Her memories soon merge with the imaginative pictorial worlds she invents in her work, creating a glorious and perturbing narrative.”

California

(Biblioklept)

Longlist for the 2026 Women’s Prize For Fiction Released

The Women’s Prize Trust announced the longlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which highlights sixteen novels—including seven debuts, seven American writers, and nine offerings from indie publishers—published in the last year.

• Lucy Apps, Gloria Don’t Speak
• Hannah Lillith Assadi, Paradiso 17
• Elaine Castillo, Moderation
• Susan Choi, Flashlight
• Addie E. Citchens, Dominion
• Wendy Erskine, The Benefactors
• Virginia Evans, The Correspondent
• Marcia Hutchinson, The Mercy Step
• Sheena Kalayil, The Others
• Rozie Kelly, Kingfisher
• Lily King, Heart the Lover
• Katie Kitamura, Audition
• Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief
• Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore
• Kit de Waal, The Best of Everything
• Alice Evelyn Yang, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing

I have only read one of them (Katie Kitamura’s Audition) so I have a lot of catching up to do.

More: Literary Hub

T.S. Eliot Fun Page

Wrong Hands

Paper Engineering

Sampler paper pop-up mechanism booklet:

More here Via Kraftfuttermischwerk

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Battling Insomnia (and a Single Mosquito) - An excerpt

When some years ago I read a piece by Ernest Hemingway called Now I Lay Me, I thought there was nothing further to be said about insomnia. I see now that that was because I had never had much; it appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbor’s as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.

Now if insomnia is going to be one of your naturals, it begins to appear in the late thirties. Those seven precious hours of sleep suddenly break in two. There is, if one is lucky, the “first sweet sleep of night” and the last deep sleep of morning, but between the two appears a sinister, ever widening interval. This is the time of which it is written in the Psalms: Scuto circumdabit te veritas eius: non timebis a timore nocturno, a sagitta volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris.

With a man I knew the trouble commenced with a mouse; in my case I like to trace it to a single mosquito.

My friend was in course of opening up his country house unassisted, and after a fatiguing day discovered that the only practical bed was a child’s affair— long enough but scarcely wider than a crib. Into this he flopped and was presently deeply engrossed in rest but with one arm irrepressibly extending over the side of the crib. Hours later he was awakened by what seemed to be a pin-prick in his finger. He shifted his arm sleepily and dozed off again— to be again awakened by the same feeling.

This time he flipped on the bed-light— and there attached to the bleeding end of his finger was a small and avid mouse. My friend, to use his own words, “uttered an exclamation,” but probably he gave a wild scream.

Read More: Literary Hub