Staggering and heartbreaking magazine genius

One of the finalists for the 2012 National Magazine Awards: The Aquarium by Aleksander Hemon, published last year in The New Yorker.

Read it here.

Here's a taste:

"Isabel was asleep in the recovery room, motionless, innocent. Teri and I kissed her hands and her forehead and wept through the moment that divided our life into before and after. Before was now and forever foreclosed, while after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle star, into a dark universe of pain."

carpenters in the forehead

On to other issues.

This is for the mag class, or anyone who wants to read an example of a killer set piece. Go here for Joan Acocella's masterful New Yorker essay on everything you ever wanted to know about hangovers, appropriately entitled "A Few Too Many."

Possibly my favorite graf:

Some words for hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are “still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight.” The Swedes get “smacked from behind.” But it is in languages that describe the effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power. Salvadorans wake up “made of rubber,” the French with a “wooden mouth” or a “hair ache.” The Germans and the Dutch say they have a “tomcat,” presumably wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a “howling of kittens.” My favorites are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.”