## Metadata - Author: [[New Yorker Magazine Inc and Deborah Treisman]] - Full Title: A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker - Category: #books ## Highlights - The strangest notions had a way of forcing themselves into Rogin’s mind. Just thirty-one and passable-looking, with short black hair, small eyes, but a high, open forehead, he was a research chemist, and his mind was generally serious and dependable. But on a snowy Sunday evening while this stocky man, buttoned to the chin in a Burberry coat and walking in his preposterous gait—feet turned outward—was going toward the subway, he fell into a peculiar state. ([Location 2530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D3C2T96T&location=2530)) - In the summer of 1944, when it was nothing for trains from the provinces to be five or six hours late, I travelled to London on the night train from Edinburgh, which, at York, was already three hours late. There were ten people in the compartment, only two of whom I remember well, and for good reason. ([Location 3842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D3C2T96T&location=3842)) - The line is made up of an infinite number of points; the plane of an infinite number of lines; the volume of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume of an infinite number of volumes…. No, unquestionably this is not—more geometrico—the best way of beginning my story. To claim that it is true is nowadays the convention of every made-up story. Mine, however, is true. I live alone in a fourth-floor apartment on Belgrano Street, in Buenos Aires. Late one evening, a few months back, I heard a knock at my door. I opened it and a stranger stood there. He was a tall man, with nondescript features—or perhaps it was my myopia that made them seem that way. Dressed in gray and carrying a gray suitcase in his hand, he had an unassuming look about him. I saw at once that he was a foreigner. At first, he struck me as old; only later did I realize that I had been misled by his thin blond hair, which was, in a Scandinavian sort of way, almost white. During the course of our conversation, which was not to last an hour, I found out that he came from the Orkneys. ([Location 4647](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D3C2T96T&location=4647)) - My daughter is walking along the roadside late at night—too late, really, for a seventeen-year-old to be out alone, even in a town as safe as this—and it is raining, the first rain of the season, the streets slick with a fine immiscible glaze of water and petrochemicals, so that even a driver in full possession of her faculties, a driver who hadn’t consumed two apple Martinis and three glasses of Hitching Post pinot noir before she got behind the wheel of her car, would have trouble keeping the thing out of the gutters and the shrubbery, off the sidewalk and the highway median, for Christ’s sake…. But that’s not really what I want to talk about, or not yet, anyway. Have you heard of Tunguska? In Russia? ([Location 10976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D3C2T96T&location=10976)) - Doree had to take three buses—one to Kincardine, where she waited for one to London, where she waited again, for the city bus out to the facility. She started the trip on a Sunday at nine in the morning. Because of the waiting times between buses, it took her until about two in the afternoon to travel the hundred-odd miles. All that sitting, either on buses or in the depots, was not a thing she should have minded. Her daily work was not of the sitting-down kind. ([Location 11769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D3C2T96T&location=11769)) - We didn’t have a flower garden. There were a few clumps of devil’s pokers—spears of smoldering crimson when in bloom, and milky yellow when not. But my mother’s sister and her family, who lived closer to the mountain, had a ravishing garden: tall festoons of pinkish-white roses, a long low border of glorious golden tulips, and red dahlias that, even in hot sun, exuded the coolness of velvet. When the wind blew in a certain direction, the perfume of the roses vanquished the smell of dung from the yard, where the sow and her young pigs spent their days foraging and snortling. My aunt was so fond of the piglets that she gave each litter pet names, sometimes the same pet names, which she appropriated from the romance novels she borrowed from the library and read by the light of a paraffin lamp, well into the night. ([Location 12947](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0D3C2T96T&location=12947))