Stunning Sentences

1 week ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. It’s winter, early morning, and in this essay, Ted Kooser is walking the rolling hills of southeastern Nebraska, known as the Bohemian Alps. Nothing is too small for Kooser’s attention, and what he attends to he does with care and an ear filled with sound and rhythm.

2 weeks ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. We. The first-person plural pronoun. It’s where we begin, embedded in family, the border of self blurred with and absorbed by others, which ushers in immense good and possibly immense harm. The three young brothers watch all day for their father who is supposed to return home with a new family car. The boys see him down the block and start running to the new car, a truck, cobalt blue, with a bench seat, everything sparkling and sleek.

3 weeks ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. You run to Joy Williams when you want to laugh or experience a new brand of the world. Those absurd, quirky, irrational, bewildering moments that most writers forget or excise—Williams wants them. She collects them and makes something that has never been seen before. “Her tales offer a dark, provisional illumination, and they make the kind of sense that disperses upon waking,” wrote Katy Waldman of The New Yorker.

1 month ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Denis Johnson |Nina Schuyler

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. It’s 1917, and Robert Grainier, his wife and infant daughter live far from the railroad village of Meadow Creek, Idaho. Grainer is a laborer who does a lot of different jobs, including building bridges for the train to cross over bodies of water. The engine referred to in the sentence helps drag logs out of the forest. It’s an epic story told in miniature, a slim 116 pages, filled with beautiful sentences like this one.

1 month ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

I had technical difficulties, unfortunately, so I made a new video. And so, unfortunately, you won’t hear the stun…