Blogs about Books and literature

Islands live comfortably in the literary imagination. Cut off from the mainland and often small or negligible in population, they place characters in inescapable situations, amplify drama, and often suspend the normal rules of mainland …

Regeneration Pat Barker 1917 Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart. What to do with one of theirs who protests the war. With Wilfred Owen. The Eye in the Door Pat Barker The next in the series. I …

Medieval selfies and the earliest selfie-stickSelfies are by no means an exclusively modern phenomenon. During the Middle Ages artists would portray themselves, even realistically. The person seen here made two selfies of himself and even …

China After Mao by Frank Dikötter, 2022 Chinese Primer Zhou Enlai died in January 1976, and the Great Helmsman followed eight months later. After a brief tussle between factions, the Gang of Four was disbanded, …

The Blue FlowerMy previous post was all over the place. As I wrote, the Jena circle and its influence is a complex story. The cast in the opening paragraph of the post includes people whose …

The Word House, Winona Lake, IN(Like The Indie Bob Spot on Facebook and follow The Indie Bob Spot on X)Readers, what comes to mind for you when you think of an attic in an old …

Dugo sa Bukang-Liwayway (Bleeding Sun) by Rogelio Sicat, translated by Ma. Aurora L. Sicat (Penguin Random House SEA, 2024) The agrarian novel was a rich vein in Philippine novel writing. It pitted farmers against landlords, …

I reviewed David Brooks’s How to Know a Person for the TLS: David Brooks was raised in a Jewish family whose motto, he says, might have been “Think Yiddish, Act British.” He learned to be …

Of too much value for the clown who sungThe azure bluebells in their sapphire stemsAmong green bushes low their mute bells hungThese seemed loves modest maidens dew bestrungWith blebs o' mornings glittering pearlsI loved them …

Whenever I read stories about refugees and immigrants, they’re always so sad and tragic—and rightly so—but also that’s a very narrow way of looking at ourselves. There’s a lot more to us than being sad, …

This year I am doing a low spend year; to me, this means not buying any new clothes, makeup, skincare, books, household items…unless I don’t have any of those items at all i.e. if i …

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. …

Denys L. Page, Select Papyri III (Poetry) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941 = Loeb Classical Library, 360), p. xvi: A word about supplements. I began eager to fill every gap with flawless fragments of my …

Barry Hughart (his surname is pronounced hew-gert) died in 2019 at the age of 85. His career as a writer of fantasy was short-lived, but his work was acclaimed. His first novel, Bridge of Birds: …

This is a message I sent out to a mailing list I’m on, responding to the Scholastic Reading Report about kids and family reading. “Most alarmingly, kids in third and fourth grade are beginning to …

I was late. The minibus was already at the stop. I did something I very rarely do and broke into a run. I was the last one there. I was shown into a minibus that, …

They've announced the winner of this year's Berman Literature Prize -- a 750,000 Swedish kronor (almost US$70,000) prize which rewards: "an author whose works embody the statues of the Prize, in the spirit of the …

This upcoming election has consequences. In 2020, we saw then-President Donald J. Trump refuse to concede after losing reelection to Joe Biden, serving as an exclamation point on a term that was marred with turmoil, …

Paul Auster died on April 30 after being the voice in my ear for a month. I had only recently finished his massive novel 4321, using an approach I learned from my wife to preserve …

To begin with somebody much like any other is walking and continues to walk along streets much like any other only despite the similarity between these streets somebody walks and others alike somebody has walked …