Alex Kudera's Blog, page 5

to shield the blast from the three of them

"Years later, in the chaos of a firefight, Prany watched as a farmer picked up and brought a live grenade to his stomach to shield the blast from the three of them. They had been wandering the mountains in the east and had been running toward an abandoned truck that was blocking the passage.

"As the grenade detonated, as the man's shirt ballooned before he sank to his knees, Prany thought of his father--the smell of him, his poor posture, the permanent tar stains on his fingers. How in the early mornings as Noi slept, Prany would sneak out ahead of him, climb a tree, and wait for his father's motorbike to pass under along the road."

~~ from Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon

from the great Gary Amdahl

W.D. Clarke posted an article by Thomas Pynchon, Corona\Samizdat's Rick Harsch delivered a new video, and a couple months after finishing Gary Amdahl's Across My Big Brass Bed, I opened Gary's I AM DEATH to find these kind words. In other news, Eclectica Magazine is soon to publish "A Day's Worth"; it's my latest short story about surviving in America.

our hopeless cause

Robert G. Kaiser's "Unraveling a Repressive Regime" in The New York Review of Books is a detailed review of To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause by Benjamin Nathans. The nonfiction took decades to research and is a Pulitzer Prize Winning account of Soviet dissidents in the 1960s, '70s, and beyond. 

Does it ever bother you?

"Does it ever bother you?" Martha said. "That you live in, and are now a citizen of, the country that bombed you first?"

[Khit] said she didn't think about it as much anymore. She didn't want to. They got out. They lived.

She said, "I think of my son. What kind of life he will have. Whether he will ride a bicycle or play baseball. Whether he will have a family of his own one day. Whether he will be happy and healthy and safe, and whether he will carry in him the sadness I carry. I think always of my mother, my biological mother, and whether she died alone."

~~ from Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon

No one ever seemed to want books.

"No one ever seemed to want books."

~~ from How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee

Choukri, Proust, and Beame

From the June 26 New York Review of Books, I read Ursula Lindsey's "Mohamed Choukri's Unromantic Tangier," Maurice Samuels's "Proust's Jewish Question," and Michael Greenberg's "The Vanishing Mr. Beame."

struggling through the sand

"One morning right after the sun came up, we saw a trail of baby sea turtles struggling through the sand toward the ocean. One had flipped over onto its back, another seemed stuck in a strand of washed-up seaweed. I wanted to help them, to pick them up and put them in the water but my father wouldn’t let me. I said what if they don’t make it? And he said then they don’t make it."  

~~ from "Romans" by Greta Schledorn

original fiction and baseball-card deals

We've deals on original novels and baseball trading cards.

a life could vanish

"He thought of these years as another life within the one he had.  As though it were a thing he was able to carry. A small box. A handkerchief. A stone. He did not understand how a life could vanish. How that was even possible. How it could close in an instant before you could reach inside one last time, touch someone's hand one last time. How there would come a day when no one would wonder about the life he had before this one."

~~ from Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon

the loneliness of freedom

"At first there was loneliness. Then there was loss. And then there was a greater loneliness, the loneliness of freedom. Freedom: Once I am truly safe, I see that there is too much of it. Freedom means that you are free not to care about anyone or anything. Freedom shows me that all that matters to the free world is money."

~~ from How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee