“We’re all good when we want to be, otherwise we’re fucking animals. There’s no VIP room in reality, and there is no reality in this city. You can’t Google the answers. People talk about being on the ride of your life—THIS IS YOUR LIFE. Whatever you need to know, you already know. Imagine what it is to be in another country, another landscape—heat, insects, fear. Imagine watching someone right in front of you trip on a wire, step on a mine, blow their body to shreds, in mid-sentences, mid-cigarette. Imagine yourself splattered with human flesh. Imagine talking to that boy for the five minutes when he is profoundly conscious of the fact that he is not going to make it home. Imagine the difference between that and being in upstate New York, drinking beer, trying to get laid, and spending the summer as lifeguard at Lake George. Imagine zipping your friends into body bags. Tell me why anyone ever thought this was a good idea. How could anyone not be angry? You’d have to be insane.”

— from This Book Will Save Your Life by A M Homes


other titles by A M Homes :

+ In a Country of Mothers
+ Things You Should Know
+ The Safety of Objects
+ Music for Torching
+ Jack
+ The End of Alice
+ May We Be Forgiven

“There’s more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvising builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don’t need permission for them. There’s more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we’re just passing through.”

— from Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin

MY MOTHER’S HAND

I have my mother’s hands today.
They sting from cuts and burns,
reminders of my payments
with blood and flesh
for marriage,
a house people call home.
A vein twitches painfully but
one by one the dishes are cleaned.

My hands,
they smell like a memory
I keep close to me,
a memory of my mother
cupping my face in her hands.
Lovingly.

I wonder,
again and again,
why I had pushed
these hands
away, when my own are the same—
smelling of grease, and
of years and years of

blood, tears and pain.


— from Keeping Skeletons by Tan Lixin

“I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man’s child. She could fade and wither - I didn’t care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.”

— from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

— from The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

Kinfolk #08 is now available at BooksActually !

“This issue is a glimpse of Japan through the Kinfolk lens. It explores the basic values, skills and recipes from a country we deeply admire and a culture that seems to echo some of the same principles we try to live by.”

— Nathan Williams, Editor

* NEW PRODUCTS AVAILABLE ! *

F R E E
L O C A L
S H I P P I N G !

Click here to SHOP online now ! : http://booksactually.bigcartel.com

STUDENT PLAYS
by Desmond Sim

In veteran playwright Desmond Sim’s first collection for students, food and family ground seven heartwarming plays as sons and daughters, fathers and grandmothers fight, heal and find love in the kitchen and around the dining table. This collection includes Drunken Prawns, winner of the first Hewlett Packard/Action Theatre Ten-Minute Play Contest, and other critically acclaimed plays such as Teochew Porridge and The Durian Man and His Daughters, with a foreword by Dr. K.K. Seet.

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SIX PLAYS
by Desmond Sim

From one of Singapore’s most garlanded playwrights comes his first collection of published plays, including Autumn Tomyam, winner of Best Original Script and Play of the Year in the 2002 DBS Life! Theatre Awards. Guaranteed to challenge readers’ prejudices, Desmond Sim’s Six Plays is a bold and often hilarious exploration of sexuality, polygamy and love in all its guises.

“…This particular blunder is known as deus ex machina, which is French for “Are you fucking kidding me?”

— from How Not to Write a Novel by Sandra Newman & Howard Mittelmark

(This title is available for sale HERE !)