fiction
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A reflection on Small Things Like These and the violence of looking away Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a quiet book. Short, restrained, almost deliberately modest. A man going about his work. A town moving through winter. A truth that has existed in plain sight for years. There are no speeches, no dramatic…
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Longing doesn’t get taken seriously. It’s often treated like a weakness. Like nostalgia. Like something indulgent you’re supposed to grow out of once you learn how the world really works. We’re told to be realistic. To manage expectations. To accept things as they are. Wanting more — especially wanting connection, tenderness, or meaning — is…
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Love stories are easy to dismiss. They’re often framed as soft or escapist — something we reach for when we don’t want to deal with the real world. But the real world right now feels anything but avoidable. It’s loud, isolating, and often cruel in ways that feel normalized. We’re encouraged to move quickly, take…
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For a long time, I believed the common line about reading: that books are an escape. A softer place to land. A way out of whatever feels unbearable in real life. But that stopped being true for me. Because the world we’re living in right now — America in 2025 — doesn’t just feel overwhelming.…
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I didn’t go into 2025 with a reading plan. I went into it tired, angry, and quietly looking for something that made sense of the world I was living in. What I found instead were books that didn’t look away. The stories that stayed with me this year weren’t light or soothing in the way…
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Why Looking for Alaska was banned, what it taught me, and what’s next in the Banned Book Challenge: The Bluest Eye. Free tracker included.
daniella does it all 