Amateur photo. Motel window without a view.

Amateur photo. Spellcasting.

Amateur photo. Neighborhood saguaro.

Amateur photo. Somewhere in suburbia, October night.

We should take time to appreciate Toni Morrison every day. Blurbs and summaries will always fail to capture what they intend because, more than anything, her stories are about life. There is horror and small magic. And there is always beauty in her language as well as in her characters.

We expect to travel too quickly and are required to travel too great of distances in too short a time. The entire system of travel expectation, work requirements, and personal demand for speed is a problem that is killing more and more of us. When does this become an unignorable problem?

For me, reading Angela Carter has always felt like finding old diaries sequestered away in the closet of what had long ago been a teenager's bedroom. The writing in the diaries is genius, cathartic, comparable really to little else in the English language.

Mervyn Peake shows us that there is fantasy enough to be found in our own reality. In all the everyday things, there is a wealth to be uncovered. Nothing is mundane.