#Adam Haslett

[dk-thrive]

I don’t know what most people mean when they use the word love. If they haven’t contorted their lives around a hope sharp enough to bleed them empty, then I think they’re just kidding.

― Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown and Company, May 3, 2016)

[litsnaps]

[quotessentially]

From Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone

[intrepidgirlreader]

The sound that he’d made, chopping firewood in his driveway, it had grated on Michael. The slow rhythm of the splitting. It had brought Michael up off the couch, to the dining room window, to watch and mutter his curses. Why couldn’t that sound do that again? I thought, in the waking dream of the moment, the unreal state of being still the only one who knew. Why couldn’t that sound summon Michael once more? Needle him, scrape at his ears. Why not? What kind of a person would I be if I didn’t at least try to call him back?

Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett

[barbwritesstuff]

Of Monsters and Mainframes spotted in the wild!

[lgbtqreads]

Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Adult Fiction: January-June 2025

Due to the delightfully large volume of titles, Romances will be getting their own post later this week! Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett (January 7th) At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of immigrants only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give.…

[libraryleopard]

Ah! It’s a national holiday! (Electric Lit’s first anticipated queer books of the year list dropped, AKA where I find out about loads of good books to read each year)

[memetaped]

you are not a stranger here taken from the 2002 adam haslett book.

it’s a rough place, but it was out of your hands.

you’re tired, dear, under the eyes. you’ve been sleeping poorly.

you want to get high?

make friends with the day, that’s my advice.

you’ve got some kind of moral sickness.

difficult to say. probably not.

it’s like you’ve experienced all this before. the way you don’t talk much, but like you’re thinking something instead, something you’re not saying.

i’m stoned.

just a friend calling.

it’s chamomile. you like chamomile.

you’re such a kidder.

duuude, check this out.

i’ve had a head cold too.

now you’re going to spend the rest of the day in here, you understand? and you have a good long think about what you’ve just done.

tell me about the kings.

garbage. you’re garbage.

terrible place. full of strangers.

we will survive this.

it’s important you don’t get confused. there are coincidences, but it doesn’t mean the world doesn’t make sense.

now, dear, i hope you’ll just help yourself to everything.

it’s a present to you, this door.

you all right in there?

and sometimes you think things when you’re sad.

struck me as a lie.

maybe you should try bending spoons.

glad to hear you’re still out there saving the world.

it’s not help you gave me. it’s not help you gave.

[vulpesevanidum]

"Without thinking, I intertwined my fingers more tightly with [his]. As though I had traveled back into some younger, more trusting self. When he squeezed my hand, I fell into pure nostalgia. The keen memory of a thing I'd never had. A nostalgia for a moment just like this. As if back when I was a teenager and I'd wanted it so achingly bad, I had met a boy and we had fallen in love, and been together in private ecstasy. And as if, at last, I could mourn the loss of that imagined happiness." -Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett

[dk-thrive]

People don’t want to be loved the way I love them. They get suffocated. It isn’t their fault. But it isn’t mine, either.

― Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown and Company, May 3, 2016)

[so-many-hills]

when … a critical thought pipes up to cut me short—I pause．And then I wonder：Why now？What is it about this … that has excited my internal doubters？… what am I afraid of？… I’ve come to realize how much of my doubt is actually fear—of being judged，of being shamed.

– Adam Haslett on the Uses of Doubt

[intrepidgirlreader]

As soon as I spoke, it would be true.

Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett

[thedanwich]

Top 10 Books of 2023

10. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma - Bessel van der Kolk

9. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer - Michelle McNamara

8. A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance - Abdurraqib Hanif

7. The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet - John Green

6. The Dreamblood Duology - N.K. Jamison

5. Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker

4. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - Jared Diamond

3. The Song of Achilles/Circe - Madeline Miller 

2. How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America - Clint Smith

Stoner - John Williams

Honorable mentions:

All-Night Pharmacy - Ruth Madievsky

A Night in Terror Tower (Goosebumps #27) - R.L. Stine

A Shocker on Shock Street (Goosebumps #35) - R.L. Stine

A Thousand-Mile Walk To The Gulf - John Muir

At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O’Neill

The Barking Ghost (Goosebumps #32) - R.L. Stine

Becoming A Man: Half a Life Story - Paul Monette

By My Hands: A Potter’s Apprenticeship - Florian Gadsby

Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii - James L. Haley

The City We Became - N.K. Jemison

The Cuckoo Clock of Doom (Goosebumps #28) - R.L. Stine 

The Doloriad - Missouri Williams

Extinction - Douglas Preston

The Glass Hotel - Emily St. John Mandel

The Headless Ghost (Goosebumps #37) - R.L. Stine 

The Haunted Mask II (Goosebumps #36) - R.L. Stine

The Horror at Camp Jellyjam (Goosebumps #33) - R.L. Stine

The House of Hidden Meanings - RuPaul

The House in the Cerulean Sea - T.J. Klune

It Came From Beneath the Sink! (Goosebumps #30) - R.L. Stine

Just Above My Head - James Baldwin

Leaving Las Vegas - John O’Brien

The Lookback Window - Kyle Dillon Hertz

Minor Detail - Adania Shibli

Monster Blood III (Goosebumps #29) - R.L. Stine

Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie

Nothing Like It in the World: The men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-69 - Stephen E. Ambrose

Night of the Living Dummy II (Goosebumps #31) - R.L. Stine

POST - Leo Herrera

Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture - Jenny Odell

Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes (Goosebumps #34) - R.L. Stine

Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in Verse - Brontez Purnell

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin

Under a Rock: A Memoir - Chris Stein

Women Talking - Miriam Toews

You Are Not A Stranger Here: Stories - Adam Haslett