Anatomy of a Sentence

Anatomy of a Sentence: Yves Ravey's Alerte

Anatomy of a Sentence: Yves Ravey's Alerte

Take a deep breath. Now read.

Translator Phoebe Weston-Evans discusses a breathless, surreal sentence from Yves Ravey's Alerte

"There’s something about the unbridled energy of its form that blurs the notions of past and present and arranges them, briefly, uncomfortably, on the same plane."  —Phoebe Weston-Evans

Anatomy of a Sentence: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars

Anatomy of a Sentence: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars

“The earth teaches us more about ourselves than all the books in the world, because it is resistant to us.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Daniel Stephensen explores this revelatory sentence that opens Wind, Sand and Stars, an integral phrase missing from some translations. 

Anatomy of a Sentence: Don DeLillo's Underworld

Anatomy of a Sentence: Don DeLillo's Underworld

“The sound of the ash bat making contact with the ball reaches Cotter Martin in the left-field stands, where he sits in a bony-shouldered hunch.”
—Don DeLillo, Underworld

In today’s Anatomy of a Sentence, we explore sound and its ability to connect disparate people. Alongside a memorable sentence from Underworld, we look at passages in Lolita and Madame Bovary

Anatomy of a Sentence: Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men

Anatomy of a Sentence: Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men

Whatever you believe about reading, you know the ways that great sentences stay with us. They’re the ones that we find ourselves repeating as we walk down the street on a Wednesday afternoon long after the book has gathered dust on the shelf. The ones we underline or copy into a notebook for some future purpose we can’t name. The ones that send a charge up our spines.

We begin our new series Anatomy of a Sentence with Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and our favorite third sentence.