404 Error Landing
You haven’t reached another planet. You’ve arrived on a page that no longer exists.
For your time and effort,
—a story.
The Right Book is like a bat that swoops & clings unexpectedly, moving through our darkness like a denser dark, yet always on target, directed by echoes, swayed by resonance.
And the resonances remain long after the specific words that bred them have been forgotten. We are revealed to ourselves, we feel these dark scratches were composed expressly & singularly for us—even by us.
We are astonished to find ourselves moved by the hieroglyphic breath of a stranger who may not even have spoken our language, who may have died years, decades, generations before we were born and whose orphaned light has, been traveling all this time in search of us.
—B. Alexandra Szelip
painter, sculptor, writer
I hope you enjoyed the story.
B. Alexandra Szerlip is a two-time National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellow, a Yaddo fellow, and runner-up for London's Lothian Prize for a first biography-in-progress. She has contributed to The Paris Review Daily and The Believer, among other publications, and has worked in professional theater, as a book editor, painter, sculptor and graphic designer. Raised on the East Coast, she lives in San Francisco.