Each month, we comb through dozens of soon-to-be-published books, for ideas and good writing for the Review’s site. Often we’re struck by particular paragraphs or sentences from the galleys that stack up on our desks and spill over onto our shelves. We sometimes share them with each other on Slack, and we thought, for a change, that we might share them with you. Here are some we found this month.

—Sophie Haigney, web editor, and Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor

From Mark Polizzoti’s new translation of André Breton’s Nadja(NYRB Classics):

A certain attitude toward beauty necessarily results from this, beauty that is conceived here solely in terms of passion. It is in no way static, in other words encased in its “dream of stone,” lost for mankind in the shadow of Odalisques, behind those tragedies that claim to encompass only a single day; nor is it dynamic, in other words subject to that rampant gallop after which there is only another rampant gallop, in other words more scattered than a snowflake in a blizzard, in other words determined never to let itself be embraced, for fear of being confined … It is like a train ceaselessly lurching from the Gare de Lyon, but that I know will never leave, has never left. It is made of jolts and shocks, most of which are not significant but which we know will necessarily bring about a huge Shock… The morning paper can always bring me news of myself:

From Jeff Weiss’s Waiting for Britney Spears(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a memoir of his time as a tabloid journalist:

Love bludgeons me before I fully understand what it means. It requires only a caramel-blonde whip of hair, a harem dancer hip shimmy, a lashing of apricot arms, a dizzying 360-degree whirl, and a graceful floor slide. I saw the sign, an immaculate conception, a fated tarot. Only a higher power could have blessed me to bear witness to the taping of the “… Baby One More Time” video. 

From the “bad boy of American literature” James Frey’s novel Next to Heaven(Authors Equity):

But, like hockey, playing the hanky-panky horizontal refreshment game also had its dangers, the most dangerous of which was love. 

From Hélène Bessette’s Lili Is Crying(New Directions), translated from the French by Kate Briggs:

Her face golden, velvety, soft, soft, very soft, so soft, too soft, and her eyes brown (the self-same eyes that once caused a man to take his own life).
She turns her waist toward the mother Charlotte, the waist of a young-girl-from-Arles, and her rounded hips under her pleated skirt.
She turns her dark wavy hair tucked beneath a brightly colored scarf.
She turns her tears.
The tears of the girl from Arles, who never appears in the story, whom no one can ever remember having seen.

From Jesse Ball’s The History of the Dolls and What They Did (Hanuman Editions):

Lucy is my enemy. I will hurt her if I can.

Abigail looked at the doll. Its face seemed contorted with rage.

Which one is Lucy, again?

Emily answered.

She’s the short fat one with buckteeth and a hairlip. She wears polka dots and shows off her legs. 

Now Em, said Vivian, we do try to tell the truth don’t we? Lucy is the prettiest of the dolls, and the dolls are all pretty. Every doll is prettier than the one before, they’re made that way, and Lucy is the very prettiest. I used to even keep her on a different shelf. I don’t think you’ve ever seen her. 

She went over to a special case and took out Lucy, and set her on the shelf with the other dolls. 

Here she is, she’s Emily’s nemesis. They will hate each other until the world ends. 

From Joan Sales’s Winds of the Night(NYRB Classics), a novel of postwar Catalonia translated by Peter Bush and first published in Catalan in 1983:

That had been at the foot of the French Pyrenees. In the rampant disorder of the defeated army crossing the frontier, farmers’ mules had evidently got mixed up with army mules, and all this rushed back to me as l advanced bewildered across a carpet which was so sumptuous, soft and red. I glimpsed vast lounges and sophisticated ladies who seemed buried in the depths of armchairs that were too big and deep for figures that were so tall and thin, who smoked and looked bored out of their minds as they crossed their legs; how bored they were, how unhappy they seemed, how long-legged they were! And brutalised by boredom and filthy from concentration-camp shit, soldiers wheeled in circles around them, served as a distraction in the absence of anything better. Among those ladies who smoked and were bored idled a few men of the species that one only meets in such palaces, the species of man who looks to be forty-five, always forty-five to the day, and is always turning over in his head the most crucial and complex of business deals. The soldiers were shouting like people at a football or boxing match, they were shouting to hurry the mules along, the spectacle was simply shocking, until red with indignation as I had never seen him before, Picó erupted: “It was shameful how we allowed ourselves to be given a hiding by the fascists, at least we could have a little culture!” And that was going through my mind as I crossed those lounges bewildered, as they all stared, men who were eternally forty-five and women who were eternally bored to death, staring at me in alarm, as I walked among them.

From Purityby Andrzej Tichý, translated from the Swedish by Nichola Smalley (And Other Stories):

Yes. And I wake to find Karl burning me with a cigarette, then he roars so loud the neighbors start banging on the wall, or the floor or the wall or the ceiling or the floor or the wall or the floor and he tells me people die all the time, most of them are Americans, in cultural terms, because Americans took over the world in the fifties, but a man in a white hoodie passes the window and it says SWEDEN, he’s talking on the phone and he looks cold. It’s misty out there. I have a shave and recall that someone was here during the night. Some kind of dog was here putting its nose in my face as I slept. When I ask Karl about it, he doesn’t reply. Just says, Psycho. Psycho.

From Peter Mendelsund’s Exhibitionist(Catapult):

​​More whiskey on the paintings. More and more. The stains are beautiful. And this wanton expenditure of alcohol means I’m drinking less of it, as I have less to drink. The paintings are drinking for me. (A book about people who can be hired by alcoholics to drink for them—drink on their behalf—debase themselves so their clients won’t have to. Book about professional abasement. Like Kafka’s story. A book about professional mourners. People paid to be abject. Forms of hunger artistry. One book called “Drinkers,” the other called ‘Weepers.”)

From Homework: A Memoirby Geoff Dyer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux):

In the garden I sat, sometimes with my dad, on the green-painted swing-bench, sometimes alone, looking at the house, the house with windows in it, made of beige-pink bricks. One of the windows was my bedroom, reflecting the gorgeous top of a tree. Grass, flowers, and always sky. Thick hedges, not as neat as they had been years earlier. Sheds, coal bunker, garage and conservatory. Next door. The lawn, blades of grass and the unlit bonfire. The fence at the bottom of the garden and the sound of the road. Birds in flight, over the roof of the house. Shifting clouds, sudden clarities of light and leaves. The apprehended world. That’s the phrase that kept tolling in my head: the apprehended world.