Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 174 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure gives an account of the trials of two rebels: Jude is battling the class system in trying to obtain the Oxford education reserved for the elite; Sue Bridehead has set herself against a number of patriarchal institutions, principally marriage and the church. Both are beaten. Jude dies solitary and desolate with the merry echoes of Oxford’s Eights Week boat races mocking his agony. Sue returns to the “fanatic prostitution” of living with her first husband, Richard Phillotson, a man she despised. Hardy’s Jude is a complete human being composed of both sense and spirit, mind and body. In a classic instance of the Victorian triangle he is tom between two women who are incomplete beings. Arabella is at one pole, utter carnality, “a complete and substantial female animal—no more, no less.”157 In Hardy’s grotesque parody of Cupid’s shaft, they first meet when Arabella pitches the scrotum of a butchered barrow-pig at Jude’s head. At the other pole stands Sue—pure spirit. They are the familiar Lily and Rose, but Sue is a lily with a difference—she has a brain. Yet she is repelled by sense, for Sue is not only the New Woman, but by a complex set of frequently unsympathetic defenses, at times convincing, and at times only a rather labored ambivalence of Hardy’s own—she is the Frigid Woman as well. Hardy is disgusted by Arabella, appalled, if intrigued, by her crude and terrible vitality. He champions Sue through a series of uningratiating maneuvers, but he is always slightly nervous about her. In a defensive postscript written seventeen years after his first preface, he appears to have been rather embarrassed and even annoyed at what the public took her to be: After the issue of Jude the Obscure as a serial story in Gennany, an experienced reviewer of that country informed the writer that Sue Bridehead, the heroine, was the first delineation in fiction of the woman who was coming into notice in her thousands every year—the woman of the feminist movement—that slight, pale, “bachelor” girl—the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves, that modern conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet; who does not recognize the necessity for most of her sex to follow marriage as a profession, and boast themselves as superior people because they are licensed to be loved on the premises. The regret of this critic was that the portrait of the newcomer had been left to be drawn by a man, and was not done by one of her own sex, who would never have allowed her to break down at the end.158

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The perfidious machine penetrates to the two-thirds mark and the tearing it causes combined with its extreme heat are about to deprive me of the use of my senses; meanwhile, the superior, showering an uninterrupted stream of invectives upon the parts he is molesting, has himself excited by his follower; after fifteen minutes of rubbing which lacerates me, he releases the spring, a quart of nearly boiling water is fired into the last depths of my womb... I fall into a faint. Severino was in an ecstasy... he was in a delirium at least the equal of my agony. "Why," said the traitor, "that's nothing at all. When I recover my wits, we'll treat those charms much more harshly... a salad of thorns, by Jesus! well peppered, a copious admixture of vinegar, all that tamped in with the point of a knife, that's what they need to buck them up; the next mistake you make, I condemn you to the treatment," said the villain while he continued to handle the object of his worship; but two or three homages after the preceeding night's debauches had near worked him to death, and I was sent packing. Upon returning to my chamber I found my new companion in tears; I did what I could to soothe her, but it is not easy to adjust to so frightful a change of situation; this girl had, furthermore, a great fund of religious feeling, of virtue, and of sensitivity; owing to it, her state only appeared to her the more terrible. Omphale had been right when she told me seniority in no way influenced retirement; that, simply by the monks' caprice, or by their fear of ulterior inquiries, one could undergo dismissal at the end of a week as easily as at the end of twenty years. Octavie had not been with us four months when Jerome came to announce her departure; although 'twas he who had most enjoyed her during her sojourn at the monastery, he who had seemed to cherish her and seek her more than any other, the poor child left, making us the same promises Omphale had given; she kept them just as poorly. From that moment on, my every thought was bent upon the plan I had been devising since Omphale's departure; determined to do everything possible to escape from this den of savages, nothing that might help me succeed held any terrors for me. What was there to dread by putting my scheme into execution? Death. And were I to remain, of what could I be certain? Of death.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  The taller woman took a double fistful of her shirt and hung on grimly, jaw set and eyes bulging, as blood sheeted down her throat. Ramona twisted the knife. Viv’s grip went slack. She folded up and fell. “Hold me closer, Tony Danza,” Ramona muttered, half-numb. She knelt and wiped her knife on Viv’s jacket, leaving a dark streak of blood. “What?” Fran stared at her like she’d grown a second head. The trans girl’s voice was reedy with terror. “What? Why?” “Go,” said Ramona. “Get out of here. Now.” The other girl scrambled down off the table and skipped over Viv’s outflung arm with a whimper of fear, never taking her eyes off Ramona until she was well clear of the patio. Then she put her head down and took off up the beach at a flat sprint. Ramona watched her go, breathing hard in spite of the clean air and the soft, soothing sound of the waves. What the fuck did I just do? Part Three. Terf War PART THREE TERF WAR Internally, I’m thinking, of course trans girls all love and fuck each other. Who else will? When I first learned the term brick for those square never-will-be-passable trans women, it was auxiliary to an explanation for another term, masonry : as in brick-on-brick love—only bricks get stuck to other bricks. Except what do you do with the meanness of the word masonry itself—it was other trans women, the only ones that bricks could supposedly trust, who came up with that hilariously cruel slang. Brick-on-brick betrayal. But we have to understand each other well to be so cruel. —Torrey Peters, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones I. Lighthouse I LIGHTHOUSE When Fran reached the Screw, it was already burning. A few women stood outside it in the smoldering wreckage of the camp. She joined them, staggering uphill, feet blistered in her evening flats after a long night of creeping through the woods and side roads, too afraid of TERF kill squads to risk a direct route. Smoke guttered out of the half-open blast doors. The dull orange glow of flames flickered within. She smelled gasoline and cooking flesh, a stink like pork left too long on the grill. I’m never going to have a cunt. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she watched flames lick at the opening. A fiery red slit. Her cock still burned with the memory of Viv’s fingers finding it, worming through her unzipped jeans to caress its stiffening length in the half-second before disgust curdled the other woman’s hungry expression, in the split second before Ramona staggered drunk out of the dark and stabbed Viv in the throat. That gaping wound, slick and pinkish red where the starlight touched its ragged lips. She imagined setting her lips to that fragile gash, tonguing its depths, kissing beads of sweat and blood off the wet landscape of its interior. “Fran!”

• From Manhunt (2022)

  We’ve been dicking around like a bunch of neo-Nazis with our walkie-talkies and our hand signals. This is real war. This isn’t fucking around anymore. She’s actually going to kill every last one of them. “Once the horde has them penned in,” said Teach, her eyes fixed and unblinking, her smile so strained that deep lines cut the corners of her mouth, “we’ll come down the coast and open up with the big guns. They won’t last long.” She’s going to kill Fran. They met the ship at the pier’s end, spray misting their coats as the destroyer, which up close rose towering above them like a wall of slate and rivets, let down its boarding ramp and Kilroy came to greet them with a crisp salute. “Welcome aboard, ma’am,” she said to Teach. “Captain Roach is ready to depart.” “Perfect,” said Teach, flashing her teeth. “Get Pierce’s things, won’t you? She’ll be in the cabin next to my stateroom.” Kilroy took Ramona’s bag, swinging it up over one shoulder, and followed close behind as they climbed up toward the deck, toward the massive guns and milling Legion women, the armed Maenads and the mismatched launches hanging over the ship’s sides. This is a nightmare, thought Ramona. I’m going to wake up any second and I’ll be back in Feather’s bed, and I’ll do it right this time, I’ll desert and take them to New York and find somewhere for us, be a manhunter or a guard or something, anything but this, I don’t want to go to war, I don’t want to see more people die, I don’t want to see Fran die, so please let me wake up. Her boots struck the deck. Teach and Kilroy went on ahead of her as a few women hurried to bring up the ramp, collapse it, and fit it back into its slot in the hull. She looked back at the pier and the Maine forest beyond it, wild and trackless and cold. Please. The ship’s horn blew an earsplitting blast as the great engines thundered to life somewhere far beneath her feet. Let me wake up. VIII. Moral Mandate VIII MORAL MANDATE The men came out of the woods just before dawn a few days after Tandeka arrived to warn them. There were only a few at first, scurrying like roaches across the swath of burnt and blackened earth as Fran scrambled down to where the wall met the fort’s concrete bunk to ring the signal bell. Robbie watched them come from where he knelt draped in a blanket on the creaking walk of the new land wall, his heart fluttering in his chest. He could hear others running in the courtyard behind him. Women on the ladders. He sat up, blinking sleep from his eyes, and settled his rifle on the wooden ramparts.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  He who does not walk along with others has inevitably to perish; everyone he encounters he collides with, and, as he is weak, he has necessarily to be crushed. It is in vain the law wishes to re-establish order and restore men to righteousness; too unjust to undertake the task, too insufficient to succeed in it, those laws will lure you away from the beaten path, but only temporarily; never will they make man abandon it. While the general interest of mankind drives it to corruption, he who does not wish to be corrupted with the rest will therefore be fighting against the general interest; well, what happiness can he expect who is in perpetual conflict with the interest of everyone else? Are you going to tell me it is vice which is at odds with mankind's welfare? I would grant this true in a world composed of equal proportions of good and bad people, because in this instance, the interest of the one category would be in clear contradiction with that of the other; however, that does not hold true in a completely corrupt society; in it, my vices outrage the vicious only and provoke in them other vices which they use to square matters: and thus all of us are happy: the vibration becomes general: we have a multitude of conflicts and mutual injuries whereby everyone, immediately recovering what he has just lost, incessantly discovers himself in a happy position. Vice is dangerous to naught but Virtue which, frail and timorous, dares undertake nothing; but when it shall no longer exist on earth, when its wearisome reign shall reach its end, vice thereafter outraging no one but the vicious, will cause other vices to burgeon but will cause no further damage to the virtuous. How could you help but have foundered a thousand times over in the course of your life, Therese? for have you not continually driven up the one-way street all the world has crowded down? Had you turned and abandoned yourself to the tide you would have made a safe port as well as I. Will he who wishes to climb upstream cover as much distance in a day as he who moves with the current? You constantly talk about Providence; ha! what proves to you this Providence is a friend of order and consequently enamored of Virtue? Does It not give you uninterrupted examples of Its injustices and Its irregularities? Is it by sending mankind war, plagues, and famine, is it by having formed a universe vicious in every one of its particulars It manifests to your view Its extreme fondness of good?

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “These new theories of hypnotism, of mental maladies, of hysteria are not simple stupidities, but dangerous or evil stupidities. Charcot, I am sure, would have said that my wife was hysterical, and of me he would have said that I was an abnormal being, and he would have wanted to treat me. But in us there was nothing requiring treatment. All this mental malady was the simple result of the fact that we were living immorally. Thanks to this immoral life, we suffered, and, to stifle our sufferings, we tried abnormal means, which the doctors call the ‘symptoms’ of a mental malady,—hysteria. “There was no occasion in all this to apply for treatment to Charcot or to anybody else. Neither suggestion nor bromide would have been effective in working our cure. The needful thing was an examination of the origin of the evil. It is as when one is sitting on a nail; if you see the nail, you see that which is irregular in your life, and you avoid it. Then the pain stops, without any necessity of stifling it. Our pain arose from the irregularity of our life, and also my jealousy, my irritability, and the necessity of keeping myself in a state of perpetual semi-intoxication by hunting, card-playing, and, above all, the use of wine and tobacco. It was because of this irregularity that my wife so passionately pursued her occupations. The sudden changes of her disposition, from extreme sadness to extreme gayety, and her babble, arose from the need of forgetting herself, of forgetting her life, in the continual intoxication of varied and very brief occupations. “Thus we lived in a perpetual fog, in which we did not distinguish our condition. We were like two galley-slaves fastened to the same ball, cursing each other, poisoning each other’s existence, and trying to shake each other off. I was still unaware that ninety-nine families out of every hundred live in the same hell, and that it cannot be otherwise. I had not learned this fact from others or from myself. The coincidences that are met in regular, and even in irregular life, are surprising. At the very period when the life of parents becomes impossible, it becomes indispensable that they go to the city to live, in order to educate their children. That is what we did.” Posdnicheff became silent, and twice there escaped him, in the half-darkness, sighs, which at that moment seemed to me like suppressed sobs. Then he continued. CHAPTER XVIII.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Yet the real interest in the story is in the crushing of the woman’s will, of which the murder is merely a consummation. As with the Story of O, or much of “exotic” pornography (e.g. that set in Near and Far Eastern or in primitive cultures, where a real or assumed contempt for women rationalizes the large dose of sexual sadism which caused the author to choose such a locale to begin with), the interest is not in the physical pain inflicted but in the damage done to will and spirit, the humiliation of the human claim or dignity of the victim. Progress is measured in hundreds of phrases like this: “…she was very tired. She lay down on a couch of skins…and she slept, giving up everything”179…“she was utterly strange and beyond herself, as if her body were not her own.”180 Imprisoned in a little hut, drugged day after day as the torture drags on, vomiting continuously, she is reduced to a phenomenal despair and passivity “as if she had no control over herself,”181 Lawrence lingers over her gradual relinquishment of selfhood: “She was not in her own power, she was under the spell of some other control. And at times she had moments of terror and horror…the Indians would come and sit with her, casting their insidious spell over her by their very silent presence…As they sat they seemed to take her will away, leaving her will-less and victim to her own indifference.”182 The message—for this story has a message—is revealed at last in a central passage, when the author delivers a formal lecture to the modern woman: In the strange towering symbols on the heads of the changeless, absorbed women, she seemed to read once more the Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin. Her kind of womanhood, intensely personal and individual, was to be obliterated again, and the great primeval symbols were to tower once more over the fallen individual independence of women. The sharpness and the quivering nervous consciousness of the highly-bred white woman was to be destroyed again, womanhood was to be cast once more into the great stream of impersonal sex and impersonal passion. Strangely, as if clairvoyant, she saw the immense sacrifice prepared, and she went back to her little house in a trance of agony.183 Well she might. With bemused pity one contemplates those women of Africa, Asia, and South America, lobbying in the United Nations for civil rights. Sadly misled, they have failed to grasp Lawrence’s wise understanding of the impropriety in their hope of sexual revolution—and their own importance as models to the rest of their sex.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Madame herself is kind, with the kindness of the comfortable middle class who can afford good manners. (To a lady who congratulated herself on giving her maid her discarded dresses, Genet quietly replied, “How nice, and does she give you hers?’)61 But the maids, playing at being mistress to each other, are not nice. Outcasts in an emotional complicity with the ruling order, they invent insults (“Servants ooze.” “They are not of the human race”)62 exposing the poisonous effect their declared inferiority (agreed upon by others and agreed to by themselves) has had upon them. So much do they believe in their superiors’ edition of their lives, they cannot escape servitude save in self-laceration, and their revolt is only the criminal’s folly which inevitably rebounds back upon itself. But here, in contrast to the novels, it is presented for the first time with explicitness devoid of romantic sentimentality. The maids’ suffering is exquisite, but their oppression is too effective; out of their predicament as selves defined by another, there is as yet no exit. The Balcony, which concentrates on the political connotations of sex role as power, is another case of failed rebellion, but a great advance over the maids’ claustral dilemma in that an actual revolution might have occurred if it had any alternate values to set up in place of the ancien régime it has temporarily destroyed. Armand names the problem: “I personally don’t believe in their masquerade, not one bit. But is there any stronger force to replace them?”63 A history of belief and co-operation paralyzes one. In Carmen the prostitute, participation in masculine fantasy has created such identification with the role that it becomes her reality; excused from the charade, she craves those heady moments when she was The Immaculate Conception of Lourdes to a bank clerk. In the same way, the participation of a whole populace in the ancient myths of the church, the law, and the army, bring about instantaneous capitulation when imposters standing in for these members of the “Nomenclature” are paraded through the city in state. Humanity is a bit infantilized, like the masochist in studio four who wishes only to be tied and spanked, so schooled in the old rites it loves them.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Is it not clear that leaving us the power to create, not to create, or to destroy, we will not delight her at all or disappoint her any more by adopting toward the one or the other the attitude which suits us best; and what could be more self-evident than that the course we choose, being but the result of her power over us and the influence upon us of her actions, will far more surely please than it will risk offending her. Ah, Therese ! believe me, Nature frets very little over those mysteries we are great enough fools to turn into worship of her. Whatever be the temple at which one sacrifices, immediately she allows incense to be burned there, one can be sure the homage offends her in no wise; refusals to produce, waste of the semen employed in production, the obliteration of that seed when it has germinated, the annihilation of that germ even long after its formation, all those, Therese, are imaginary crimes which are of no interest to Nature and at which she scoffs as she does at all the rest of our institutions which offend more often than they serve her." Coeur-de-fer waxed warm while expounding his perfidious maxims, and I soon beheld him again in the state which had so terrified me the night before; in order to give his lesson additional impact, he wished instantly to join practice to precept; and, my resistances notwithstanding, his hands strayed toward the altar into which the traitor wanted to penetrate.... Must I declare, Madame, that, blinded by the wicked man's seductions; content, by yielding a little, to save what seemed the more essential; reflecting neither upon his casuistries' illogicalities nor upon what I was myself about to risk since the dishonest fellow, possessing gigantic proportions, had not even the possibility to see a woman in the most permissible place and since, urged on by his native perversity, he most assuredly had no object but to maim me; my eyes as I say, perfectly blind to all that, I was going to abandon myself and become criminal through virtue; my opposition was weakening; already master of the throne, the insolent conqueror concentrated all his energies in order to establish himself upon it; and then there was heard the sound of a carriage moving along the highway. Upon the instant, Coeur-de-fer forsakes his pleasures for his duties; he assembles his followers and flies to new crimes. Not long afterward, we hear cries, and those bandits, all bloodied over, return triumphant and laden with spoils. "Let's decamp smartly," says Coeur-de-fer, "we've killed three men, the corpses are on the road, we're safe no longer."

• From Manhunt (2022)

  The leaves had changed. All pale yellow and warm orange and deep, bloody red. When had that happened? He grabbed the back of her windbreaker, dragged her to the tailgate, and threw her out. He paused for a moment, watching the men close in, then kicked the gun out after her and slammed the doors. Threw himself into the cab and scrambled awkwardly behind the wheel. Started the van with fumbling, bloody fingers, not yet daring to look at the bullet wound in his shoulder, which hurt as though someone had pushed a heated wire under his skin. The cat lay curled placidly in the passenger seat, trauma forgotten. He saw her moving in the water-spotted rearview as he pulled out of the parking lot. She got up onto her knees, bad arm limp at her side, one eye swelling shut. For a moment she stared after the van, the gun coming up as though she meant to try for one of his tires. Then she closed her eyes and shoved the barrel up under her jaw. There was a deep, throaty bang . The top of her head came off like a cheap toupee. She collapsed onto her side as the men converged on her, and through the press of their malformed bodies, just for a moment, her red-gold hair caught the sun and burned bright as a torch. “She missed,” he said shortly, cutting the ties and sliding his knife back into its sheath. “Come on. We should get out of here.” Beth rubbed her chafed and tingling wrists and wiggled her fingers. The pinky felt more like a sprain than a break. Robbie helped her up gently. “God,” he breathed as the light that filtered through the canopy found her bruised and aching face. “She really did a number on you.” “I was trying to get her mad.” Her head still ached abominably, and her right eye had swollen to a slit. She was afraid to touch her nose to find out if it was broken. There was blood drying on her upper lip. “I thought maybe I could, I don’t know, headbutt her or something, if she got close enough.” I wanted her to get it over with and kill me. I’m so sick of crying and begging all the time. The world’s not going to get better. He nodded. “Let’s go.” “Robbie.” He looked back questioningly at her and she took his hands, noting for the first time the dried blood crusting the right shoulder of his hoodie, and stood on her toes—the slope put him a few inches taller—to kiss his cheek. In a flash he was hugging her, crushing her against his strong, narrow chest.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  There had been a lot of crying at the start of the trip. Two of their group had died in the Screw. The tall black girl, Zia, had held one of them while she choked on her own blood. Would this be the same as the bunker? Running away from yet another home, relying on strangers to do something other than torture and exploit them? She pressed herself deeper into Indi’s malleable and reassuring warmth, inhaling the weed smell caught in the other woman’s thick black hair, the scent of sweaty armpits and unwashed skin. She kept thinking of Sylvia’s hands clawing feebly at her face, of the fat sludge-gray bubble of depression that had popped inside her chest when she realized Corinne was really going to kill her. At first she’d thought the woman was taking her into the woods because she didn’t have the nerve to pull a trigger, but if she hadn’t to start with, Beth had talked it into her. At least it would have been over, she thought, closing her eyes. At least I wouldn’t be so fucking tired all the time. They jounced and rumbled down a logging road that cut through the woods to the north of the Screw, low-hanging branches scraping their sides and hissing against the Jeep’s cloth top. The sun was coming up, and in the distance Fran could hear the raw, wild calls of men emerging from their dens to the smell of smoke and burning meat heavy on the wind. She hoped they’d go in search of that, rather than the roar of the Jeep’s engine. She looked at Robbie as his profile emerged from the predawn gloom. He was angry with her, she knew, but he’d waited. He’d been there. “You stayed behind for me.” “I had no idea where you were,” said Robbie, shifting up as the rutted track began to climb. “I was torching the motor pool to keep it away from the TERFs. We were gonna send some of Zia’s cis girls into town for you tomorrow.” Her lip trembled. She felt a sour, burning kind of misery at the back of her throat. Don’t cry. “Oh.” He glanced at her, that high brow furrowed, his black hair escaping in strands from the knot at the back of his head. “Why did you come back?” “A TERF tried to kill me,” she said spitefully, attempting not to relish the unassailable position of her victimhood too much. “She was trying to fuck me, all over me. I couldn’t get her off, and then she put her hand down my pants. Another girl saw it happen and stabbed her right in front of me. In the neck.” The venom drained from her as she recounted the story. Her fingers tingled. Her own voice sounded far away and thin. The thumps as the Jeep took each frost heave and rut seemed to jolt up not through her body but into a dumb sack of meat and bone.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Accustomed to reaping nothing but the first fruits, how, without this ceremony, should I be able to harvest any pleasures from this creature ?" Saint-Florent had the most violent erection, they were currying and drubbing his device to keep it rampant; grasping that pike, he advances: in order to excite him further, Julien enjoys Cardoville before his eyes; Saint-Florent opens the attack, maddened by the resistance he encounters, he presses ahead with incredible vigor, the threads are strained, some snap. Hell's tortures are as naught to mine; the keener my agonies, the more piquant seem to be my tormenter's delights. At length, everything capitulates before his efforts, I am ripped asunder, the glittering dart sinks to the ultimate depths, but Saint-Florent, anxious to husband his strength, merely touches bottom and withdraws; I am turned over; the same obstacles: the savage one scouts them as he stands heating his engine and with his ferocious hands he molests the environs in order to put the place in fit condition for assault. He presents himself, the natural smallness of the locale renders his campaign more arduous to wage, my redoubtable vanquisher soon storms the gates, clears the entry; I am bleeding; but what does it matter to the conquering hero? Two vigorous heaves carry him into the sanctuary and there the villain consummates a dreadful sacrifice whose racking pains I should not have been able to endure another second. "My turn," cries up Cardoville, causing me to be untied, "I'll have no tailoring done, but I'm going to place the dear girl upon a camping bed which should restore her circulation, and bring out all the warmth and mobility her temperament or her virtue refuse us." Upon the spot La Rose opens a closet and draws out a cross made of gnarled, thorny, spiny wood. 'Tis thereon the infamous debauchee wishes to place me, but by means of what episode will he improve his cruel enjoyment? Before attaching me, Cardoville inserts into my behind a silver-colored ball the size of an egg; he lubricates it and drives it home: it disappears. Immediately it is in my body I feel it enlarge and begin to burn; without heeding my complaints, I am lashed securely to this thorn-studded frame; Cardoville penetrates as he fastens himself to me: he presses my back, my flanks, my buttocks on the protuberances upon which they are suspended. Julien fits himself into Cardoville; obliged to bear the weight of these two bodies, and having nothing to support myself upon but these accursed knots and knurs which gouge into my flesh, you may easily conceive what I suffered; the more I thrust up against those who press down upon me, the more I am driven upon the irregularities which stab and lacerate me.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I handed these lines to the negress, and hastened away as fast as I could go. I arrived at the railway-station all out of breath. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my heart and stopped. I began to weep. It is humiliating that I want to flee and I can’t. I turn back—whither?—to her, whom I abhor, and yet, at the same time, adore. Again I pause. I cannot go back. I dare not. But how am I to leave Florence. I remember that I haven’t any money, not a penny. Very well then, on foot; it is better to be an honest beggar than to eat the bread of a courtesan. But still I can’t leave. She has my pledge, my word of honor. I have to return. Perhaps she will release me. After a few rapid strides, I stop again. She has my word of honor and my bond, that I shall remain her slave as long as she desires, until she herself gives me my freedom. But I might kill myself. I go through the Cascine down to the Arno, where its yellow waters plash monotonously about a couple of stray willows. There I sit, and cast up my final accounts with existence. I let my entire life pass before me in review. On the whole, it is rather a wretched affair—a few joys, an endless number of indifferent and worthless things, and between these an abundant harvest of pains, miseries, fears, disappointments, shipwrecked hopes, afflictions, sorrow and grief. I thought of my mother, whom I loved so deeply and whom I had to watch waste away beneath a horrible disease; of my brother, who full of the promise of joy and happiness died in the flower of youth, without even having put his lips to the cup of life. I thought of my dead nurse, my childhood playmates, the friends that had striven and studied with me; of all those, covered by the cold, dead, indifferent earth. I thought of my turtle-dove, who not infrequently made his cooing bows to me, instead of to his mate.—All have returned, dust unto dust. I laughed aloud, and slid down into the water, but at the same moment I caught hold of one of the willow-branches, hanging above the yellow waves. As in a vision, I see the woman who has caused all my misery. She hovers above the level of the water, luminous in the sunlight as though she were transparent, with red flames about her head and neck. She turns her face toward me and smiles. * * * * * I am back again, dripping, wet through, glowing with shame and fever. The negress has delivered my letter; I am judged, lost, in the power of a heartless, affronted woman. Well, let her kill me. I am unable to do it myself, and yet I have no wish to go on living.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I was unable to reply. “Severin,” she continued softly, “what is the matter? Are you ill?” Her voice sounded so sympathetic, so kind, so full of love, that it clutched my breast like red-hot tongs and I began to sob aloud. “Severin,” she began anew. “My poor unhappy friend.” Her hand gently stroked my hair. “I am sorry, very sorry for you; but I can’t help you; with the best intention in the world I know of nothing that would cure you.” “Oh, Wanda, must it be?” I moaned in my agony. “What, Severin? What are you talking about?” “Don’t you love me any more?” I continued. “Haven’t you even a little bit of pity for me? Has the beautiful stranger taken complete possession of you?” “I cannot lie,” she replied softly after a short pause. “He has made an impression on me which I haven’t yet been able to analyse, further than that I suffer and tremble beneath it. It is an impression of the sort I have met with in the works of poets or on the stage, but I always thought it was a figment of the imagination. Oh, he is a man like a lion, strong and beautiful and yet gentle, not brutal like the men of our northern world. I am sorry for you, Severin, I am; but I must possess him. What am I saying? I must give myself to him, if he will have me.” “Consider your reputation, Wanda, which so far has remained spotless,” I exclaimed, “even if I no longer mean anything to you.” “I am considering it,” she replied, “I intend to be strong, as long as it is possible, I want—” she buried her head shyly in the pillows—“I want to become his wife—if he will have me.” “Wanda,” I cried, seized again by that mortal fear, which always robs me of my breath, makes me lose possession of myself, “you want to be his wife, belong to him for always. Oh! Do not drive me away! He does not love you—” “Who says that?” she exclaimed, flaring up. “He does not love you,” I went on passionately, “but I love you, I adore you, I am your slave, I let you tread me underfoot, I want to carry you on my arms through life.” “Who says that he doesn’t love me?” she interrupted vehemently. “Oh! be mine,” I replied, “be mine! I cannot exist, cannot live without you. Have mercy on me, Wanda, have mercy!” She looked at me again, and her face had her cold heartless expression, her evil smile. “You say he doesn’t love me,” she said, scornfully. “Very well then, get what consolation you can out of it.” With this she turned over on the other side, and contemptuously showed me her back. “Good God, are you a woman without flesh or blood, haven’t you a heart as well as I!” I cried, while my breast heaved convulsively.

• From The Art of Memoir

  able to articulate: “I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.” As you watch the narrator feel around the edges of consciousness for its “slippery hold”—probing for what really went down—you enter a singular set of psychic perceptions. But craving that “hold” or permanence in what’s past is Nabokov’s inner enemy. Even a writer with gargantuan external enemies must face off with himself over a book’s course. Otherwise, why write in first person at all? The split self or inner conflict must manifest on the first pages and form the book’s thrust or through line—some journey toward the self’s overhaul by book’s end. However random or episodic a book seems, a blazing psychic struggle holds it together, either thematically or in the way a plot would keep a novel rolling forward. Often the inner enemy dovetails with the writer’s own emotional investment in the work at hand. Why is she driven to tell the tale? Usually it’s to go back and recover some lost aspect of the past so it can be integrated into current identity. Frank Conroy’s inner enemy is his inability to maintain balance and control in the chaotic world of his feckless family without either disassociation or rebelling in self-destructive ways. Stop-Time shows the power of spacing out to protect a kid in pain. That inner blankness or emptiness provides the place where Conroy—a professional jazz pianist when I knew him—could shape “music” or form out of his environment’s painful disorder. He enacts how a deprived kid survives, not just suffers, and it’s through disassociation —a consciousness leaving time and place. For an hour or more I lay motionless in a self-induced trance, my eyes open but seldom moving. . . . In this state my ears seemed rather far away. I was burrowed somewhere deep in my skull. And the undercurrent of the book is the aimless boredom of childhood. Since kids lack power and agency over much, they must embrace empty time. Conroy does it with bitterness.

• From My People (2022)

  Shortly thereafter, as I walked through Siena’s breathtaking art museum, so rich in ancient history and its legends and realities, I was stopped by a vivid painting portraying in Bethlehem the murder of all babies two years old and under, ordered by King Herod, who was said to have been angered over the escape of baby Jesus and obsessed by any threat to destroy him and his kingdom. Soon after I arrived back home in Oak Bluffs, another attack in London—this one, as my friend and now Vineyard summer regular, the screenwriter Misan Sagay wrote me from her winter home in London, “again targeting children.” And of course others followed, most recently Paris. One chilling moment after another—and alas, all coming around again. Urban League Director Accuses the Press of Ignoring BlacksThe New York Times MAY 5, 1975 Vernon E. Jordan Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, accused the nation’s press last night of “settling back into the spirit of ‘benign neglect’ of black people.” In a speech before the Capital Press Club in Washington, a group of predominantly black people, Mr. Jordan lauded the press for its coverage of Watergate but contended that the press, “after a fling at tokenism and liberalism”—a reference to its coverage of the civil rights movement in the 1960s—“has Watergated black people in its treatment of us in the news columns.” “I thought there would be an outcry from the liberal press about the San Francisco stop-and-frisk dragnet aimed at blacks,” Mr. Jordan said. “But I didn’t hear a peep out of the big-city newspapers that used to be so concerned about the rights of black people in the South.” Mr. Jordan also cited coverage of the energy crisis, focusing on middle-class whites in gasoline lines and neglecting, he said, the 7 percent rise in unemployment among black male family heads—“the first time this group’s unemployment went up while rates for teenagers and women were stable.” Mr. Jordan also criticized what he described as the low employment rate of blacks in the newspaper and broadcasting industries—“still on the order of two to four percent,” he said—and the small number of blacks in policy-making positions. “That’s another story neglected by the media,” he continued, “its own inability to reconcile its editorial liberalism with its employment policies.” In the speech, which was released here, Mr. Jordan praised the black press as “the great exception” for its coverage of events relating to black people. “In a nation apparently devoted to keeping black people under the hammer, it’s been the black organizations and the black press that has tried to tell their story and to relieve their suffering,” he said. On the Case in Resurrection CityTransaction OCTOBER 1968 Resurrection City—where the poor had hoped to become visible and effective—is dead.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Did he give me back my baby girl from Satan’s arms?” And through her tears her eyes were sharp, her gaze as cold and patient as a snake’s. “Did he make you whole?” He leaned his head against her breast and let her stroke his sweaty hair, and he said “Yes, mama,” with as much peace as he could summon, but the prayer still echoed in his ears. Lord, make me a man. Indi lay awake, sheets kicked to the foot of her new bed, and thought of the thing in the pit that had once been a man named Mackenzie. That odious rich kid name. Whiteness. Old money. Spoiled and unloved packs of boys like that had roamed the streets of Bridgeport in her childhood. Probably they still did, only now with less discernment as to who they preyed on. If I don’t give her what she wants, will she let us live? And if I do, what would it mean to put the future of the world into those little ombré claws? She rolled onto her side and drew her legs up against the comforting weight of her belly, filtered air blowing over her bare skin and carrying her sweat away into a world of dark, clean vents scoured bare by endless wind. If, if, if. I’d need computers that are nothing but rust and rat nests. Software that doesn’t exist anymore. Isolating embryos, testing chromosomes. And the baby. Am I going to do that to a kid? She closed her eyes, the room swaying around her like the hold of some dark ship. Still drunk, she thought, picturing again the pit and the thing and its dripping tongue wrapped around Sophie Widdel’s pale, clear skin. Where the fuck did I bring us? “So, you were a manhunter?” The woman in charge of worker placement, what the bunkerites called “pitching in,” wasn’t much older than Fran. In her cat’s-eye glasses and Penn State sweatshirt, the sleeves rolled up above her elbows, she looked like a tired postgrad catching up on work over the weekend. She smelled pleasantly—her odor filling the cramped closet of her office at the bunker’s midmost level—of sandalwood and something like vanilla. “Harvesting and selling,” said Fran. Slitting ballsacks open with a penknife while flies swarmed over her bloody hands. Arguing with armed premenopausal butch dykes outside Penacook over how much bear meat and block salt a Ziploc full of kidney lobes was worth. “My friend Beth did the actual hunting.” The other woman made a note on her clipboard. “And how well would you say you’re known in the greater Boston area? Up through coastal Massachusetts and New Hampshire?” “Known. Definitely known. We’ve been to Fort Fisher twice a year, three years running, and to Boston, Worcester, Manchester, Nashua—we trade in bulk to Lakeesha Wallis’s store.” Penn State scribbled for a minute, squinting as she hunched over her board, then capped her pen with a decisive click.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  She heard herself scream. Crack. The man lying across her legs had fallen still. She crawled away from him, dragging her injured leg, elbows digging into the soft ground. She saw the mantis flying, translucent wings thrumming, and the gnats and butter hoppers rising from the undergrowth around her. A dead man lay not far off, a little dribble of blood, bone, and brain laid out beside his head. Two more were screaming from atop the carcass of the big one she’d shot. They’d already eaten most of his face. His thighs were pockmarked with bloody bites. Crack. One went stumbling back and hit the wall of the abandoned house, an eerily human expression of shock painted across his smeared and twisted features. Deep fissures in his lips wept some kind of lymphatic fluid, clear and thin. Crack. He fell with a thumbprint hole in his breast. The other broke and ran, bolting like a roach into the brush. Ferns and wild brambles swallowed him. There was a thump, a grunt, and then Fran was next to her, helping her sit up, asking if she was okay, but that was all a long, long way away. Beth leaned into Fran’s shoulder, inhaling the sweat and skin smell of the hollow of her neck, and closed her eyes. I hope I die, she thought as she slipped slowly into the black oil of unconsciousness. I hope I don’t have to wake up into this again. I hope I never have to see any of it. Please. Robbie skinned his elbows coming down the tree, though he wasn’t quite sure when or how. His flannel should have stopped it, but it was hot out and he’d rolled the sleeves up. The raw skin stung where his sweat touched it. He ran across the overgrown field, rifle slung across his back, briars tearing at his clothes. He crashed through reed-thin saplings and ferns that grew waist-high in the wet, enveloping heat. The air was thick with flies. He told himself again he hadn’t shot her, that he hadn’t misjudged it. They were on her. He burst out onto open lawn, grass swishing around his knees, and slowed, panting. The girl—she looked a little older than him, late twenties or early thirties, big and broad-shouldered with half an ear missing and scars crisscrossing her still oddly innocent and childish face—lay unconscious or dead in her friend’s arms. The men he’d shot were all around them. Jesus, he thought, anxiety digging its fingers into his stomach as he came close enough to see her pallor and the ugly gashes on the back of her right calf. Don’t let her be dead . The other woman saw him.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  feel, I did her packing while she simply stood at the window, turning away from me to look out at the empty street. Early in the morning of the appointed day we set off while it was still dark, with her luggage strapped to a toboggan, and without a word we made the long journey through the snow spinning down around us, along the left bank of the Vltava, past the Baumgarten, and further out still to the Trade Fair Palace at HoleSovice. The closer we came to it, the more often did small groups of people carrying and dragging their heavy burdens emerge from the darkness, moving laboriously towards the same place through the snow, which was falling more thickly now, so that gradually a caravan strung out over a long distance formed, and it was with this caravan that we reached the Trade Fair entrance, faintly illuminated by a single electric lightbulb, towards seven in the morning. We waited there in the crowd of those who had been summoned, a silent assembly stirred only, now and then, by an apprehensive murmur running through it. There were men and there were women, families with young children and solitary figures, there were the elderly and the infirm, ordinary folk and those who had been well-to-do, all of them, in accordance with the instructions they had received, with their transport numbers round their necks on pieces of string. Agata soon asked me to leave her. When we parted she embraced me and said: Stromovka Park is over there, would you walk there for me sometimes? I have loved that beautiful place so much. If you look into the dark water of the pools, perhaps one of these days you will see my face. Well, said Vera, so then I went home. It took me over two hours to walk back to the Sporkova. I tried to think where Agata might be now, whether she was still waiting at the entrance or was already inside the Trade Fair precinct. I learned only years later, from one who had survived the ordeal, what it was like there. The people being taken away were herded into an unheated exhibition hall, a great barn-like building which was freezing in the middle of winter. It was a bleak place where, under faint, glaucous lamplight, the utmost confusion reigned. Many of those who had just arrived had to have their baggage searched, and were obliged to hand over money, watches, and other valuables to a Hauptscharfiihrer called Fiedler who was feared for his brutality. A great mound of silver cutlery lay on a table, along with fox furs and Persian lamb capes. Personal details were taken down, questionnaires handed out, and identity papers stamped EVACUATED or GHETTOIZED. The German officials and their Czech and Jewish assistants walked busily to and fro, and there was much shouting and cursing, and blows as well. Those who were to leave had to stay in the places allotted to them. Most of them were silent, some wept quietly, but outbursts of despair, loud shouting and fits of frenzied rage were not uncommon. They stayed in this cold Trade Fair building for several days, until finally, early

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  It was fucking Christmas, man! What was he supposed to do now? "This blows," was all he could muster. He sat there shirtless and forlorn, tugging on the fuzzy little soul patch on his chin and chewing nervously on the filbert-size silver tongue stud that deformed his speech slightly, then finally added, "Fucked up. Thass all I gotta say. This is fuuucked up." Billy, the commis-saucier, said nothing. His situation was somewhat more desperate than that of his colleagues, he guessed, as he was already two months behind on his rent and the Christian-rock band he shared a Hoboken apartment with had been making some very un-Christian noises of late, labeling their containers of yogurt in the refrigerator and even suggesting they might throw him out on the street if he didn't come up with rent, and soon. He looked around the room, trying to discern who might be most sympathetic to his plight. Who might be inclined to lend him money, maybe let him crash on their couch for a while. Thierry? Forget about it. He was French. Kevin? Maybe, though he didn't look too sympathetic now, tossing a spinning boning knife into the air again and again and catching it by the handle. Michelle? She'd turn him down cold. He was out of his league there and he knew it. He barely felt equal to the task of talking to her. Jimbo the garde-manger was a possibility, but Billy suspected he was gay. (There was no other explanation—in Billy's mind—for the music he liked to listen to in the kitchen. No, no way. He'd rather move back to Minneapolis than have to wake up to that music.) "We got a pretty desperate situation here, carnales," said Leon, the pastry assistant. He liked to think he spoke Spanish, though the Mexicans nearly pissed themselves laughing every time he tried. "This puppy is closing, man. Finita la fucking musica. Stick in a fork, papi chulo, turn us over 'cause we are done. This place is going down." "What do you think?" asked Kevin quietly, turning to Michelle. "How long do you think we have? I mean, we're on COD already. The dining room is fucking dead. How long till the checks start bouncing? How long till I gotta find a new job?" All Michelle said was, "you do what you gotta do," then she kicked off her pants and struggled into her jeans. She'd been faxing out resumes for a month already, and with January coming up fast, when every cook in New York who'd been burned out by the holiday season or become pissed at the size of their Christmas bonus or other perceived slight would be looking for work at the same time and at the same places, most of which would already be laying off seasonal help.