Don't miss our Monday read, from Adrianne Harun's "Catch, Release"

We're thrilled to welcome Adrianne Harun as sponsor this week. Essayist, author, and reviewer, Harun's essays and stories are widely anthologized and admired. Her new collection, Catch, Release, was praised by Tim O'Brien as "Brilliant. Masterly brilliant. Tour de force brilliant" and by Joyce Carol Oates as "Riveting. Vividly imagined, like fever dreams ..."

But don't take it from them! Take it from us: Harun's writing is mesmerizing. In the excerpt she shares this week, a plane carries a new arrival into London, an alien land he approaches with the refined dread of a nightmare-haunted childhood. Her sentences are direct, disarmingly so; she leads her readers into paragraphs where they wake, with some unease, to find they're no longer where they thought. Here's the opening to "A New Arrival":

Dawn breaks outside the oval windows and blinds them all. They are flying through the break of day, the actual point that separates the unstoppable day from cleaving night. Below them lies a heavy band of stratocumulus, like a line on a map separating one country from another. The country below us may be under siege, he thinks, but we will fly on unhindered. It has nothing to do with us.

Read more on our sponsor feature page, then buy the book at Elliot Bay or the independent bookstore of your choice.

Sponsors like Adrianne Harun make the Seattle Review of Books possible. Did you know you can sponsor us, too? We only have three slots left in the first quarter of the year (and we haven't even gone public yet!). Reserve your week of choice before it's too late: Just send us a note at sponsor@seattlereviewofbooks.com.