I am sitting and reading…there are many people in the hall, but one doesn’t feel them. They are in their books. Sometimes they move in the pages, like people who are sleeping and who turn over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading. Why are they not [...]
Here’s the cover of the French translation of The Year of Fog, forthcoming from Buchet Chastel. The book was translated by the wonderful Sophie Aslanides. I think the cover goes perfectly with the story and also with the epigram, which is from Eugene Ionesco’s beautiful memoir, Present Past/Past Present:The light of memory, or rather the [...]
Ryszard Kapuscinski on Herodotus as the first journalist, in Travels with Herodotus.
His task is complex: on the one hand, he knows that the most precious and almost the only source of knowledge is the memory of those he meets; on the other hand, he is aware that this memory is a fragile thing, volatile and [...]
At five p.m. on December 16, my mother called me into her study. I waited until she said my name twice, so I didn’t appear too eager.
There is something quietly heartbreaking in these words, spoken by the narrator of Vendela Vida’s lovely second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. Some years before the [...]
I love pie, and I loved this description of a pie shop, which emerges as an eerie, mysterious clue in Chapter 6 of Michael Chabon’s strange and clever new novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union:
The place is nothing more than a window that opens onto a kitchen equipped with five gleaming ovens. Next to the window [...]
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, Peter Orner’s beautiful novel set at a boys’ school in Namibia during the early 1990s, will be released tomorrow. If you didn’t catch it the first time around, get it now.
Related: an interesting piece by Binyavanga Wainaina in the June issue of Harper’s, excerpted from the “Glory,” which [...]
Back to Short Story Month (which is happening over at Emerging Writers Network), I’m currently reading Stuart Dybek’s beautiful collection, I Sailed With Magellan. I highly recommend the entire collection, in particular a story I heard him read a few weeks ago at the North Dakota Writers’ Conference, “We Didn’t.”
Click here to see a list [...]
Not too long ago, I picked up a used copy of Graham Greene’s Travels with my Aunt at Green Apple. Just started reading it last night. The book is narrated by a retired bank manager who meets his aunt for the first time at his mother’s funeral. A taste from paragraph one:
Everyone thought me lucky, [...]
I’ve just finished reading the ARC of Michael Ondaatje’s extraordinary new novel Divisadero, which will be published in May. The book begins with a harrowing familial violence on a farm in Petaluma and ends in another country at another time. San Francisco residents will recognize the title, which is the street where the novel’s overriding [...]
On the heels of Paul Collins’s wonderful Sixpence House, I’m reading Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism. (The paperback was released with a different subtitle: A Father’s Journey into the Lost History of Autism, which is a more accurate description of the tone and content of the book than the hardcover subtitle). The book is [...]
