Is This Beach Reading?

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Summer is here. I’m healing well and only need to use a cane as an aide to my shaky balance. Otherwise I can do just about everything I did before my damaged vertebrae. My reading is getting stronger too. Other than my difficulties with tearing eyes and disappearing visual acuity, I am experiencing an increased appetite for newer novels. Unfortunately I sense that the overall quality of the books I am reading is somewhat reduced but in compensation, the fun factor is up a notch.

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Summer Is a Great Time For Reading

c9561b9a-44a3-43d4-8869-880c07e9b86d.jpgIt’s here! Tin House #76: Summer Reading (Vol. 19, No. 4). Now that I’m getting back to normal (sorta), it’s comforting to have easy access to some great reading in one of my favorite literary journals.

That night, though, a bad thought came to her as she drowsed in the old rump-sprung armchair near the bed. Where did Mr. Cowper keep his money?

She couldn’t worry about it then, in the middle of the night. But she did. Next day as soon as she’d got him looked after she went into the other room of the two he’d sub-rented from her and Petey two weeks ago and looked around. She felt like a criminal, but she looked into his coat pockets, and at the pocketbook she found there, which had twelve dollars in it. She checked the little chest of drawers where he’d put his shirts and stuff. There was nothing else of his in the room but some books and papers on the worktable, and under the table the little humpback trunk that was all his luggage.

He’d locked it, but there was a trunk key lying out on the table with what had been in his pockets when he went up to the mine. She had to look.

—URSULA K. LE GUIN, “Pity and Shame”

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More Summer Reading From Tin House

TH72-cover-467x600In case you need a steady supply of excellent reading material, look no further than Tin House Magazine. The Summer Reading issue is just out and here’s what the editor has to say about it:

In this issue, Tracy K. Smith captures a kind of awakening, via her young daughter, in her stunning poem “Dusk.” In Carmen Machado’s story “Blur,” the protagonist sees the future clearly despite losing her glasses. In a previously untranslated story, “Pride,” by Albert Camus, God wonders “In a world where seeking is impossible and everything is known, why then have the mind?” And Alexander Chee delivers gin-inspired revelations discovered on his global search for the perfect Martini.

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