Collins unearths an early fictional biography based on the life of Emily Dickinson, penned by Helen Hunt Jackson, and “published by Niles to ianaugurate its No Name series, which published new works by writers like Jackson, Louisa May Alcott, and Christina Rossetti anonymously, allowing the books to stand or fall in review columns on their…Continue reading More from Sixpence House
Category: Litbits: excerpts from good books
Sixpence House
I’ve just finished reading Sixpence House, by Paul Collins. What a wonderful book on which to end 2006! This memoir about Collins’s year in Hay-on-Wye, the “Kingdom of Books,” was published way back in 2003, but somehow it slipped past my radar until I came across it at the San Francisco Public Library last week.…Continue reading Sixpence House
the feel of the pen
Empires fall, votes are accorded, but to those people writing in the circular room it is the feel of the pen between their fingers that matters most. E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
litbit: The Safety of Objects
Lately we’ve been doing some home improvements: new sofa, hanging pictures, rearranging furniture, considering painting our son’s room with the paint we bought two years ago, before he was born, and never got around to using. And this morning I came across this in the A.M. Homes story “Adults Alone,” from her 1990 Collection The…Continue reading litbit: The Safety of Objects
czeslaw milosz on how we came down a notch
At first, the earth ceased to be the center of the universe; then the evolution of organisms became mutually accepted; and as the human fetus was shown to repeat at certain stages in its development aspects of the life cycles of other species–to possess in fact some of the features of fish and frog–it was…Continue reading czeslaw milosz on how we came down a notch