Blogs about Books and literature

Green Onion Girl Grief Click to enlarge and scroll The post Embracing My Simmering Stew Era appeared first on Electric Literature.

2024 Ok I’m still playing catch up. Many of these I read some months ago. I’m unsure in which order but I start off as usual with a re-reading of: Tender is the Night F. …

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 …

Spook Country by William Gibson, 2007 A '90s indie-music star enters the 21st century as a freelance journalist working on a piece about locative art, interviewing a Los Angeles artist who uses augmented reality to …

I subscribe to the TLS, which does pretty good coverage of German literature and history, including Goethe. (I have even written a few reviews in the TLS on Goethe, which you can check out online.) …

The Little Book, Des Moines, IA (Like The Indie Bob Spot on Facebook and follow The Indie Bob Spot on X)The greatest joy I get on this journey is meeting so many wonderful people along …

Does he know what his sentence is?” “No,” the officer said, wanting to continue with his explanations, but the traveler interrupted him: “He does not know his own sentence?” “No,” the officer repeated, pausing briefly …

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 …

Where slanting banks are always with the sunThe daisy is in blossom even now;And where warm patches by the hedges runThe cottager when coming home from ploughBrings home a cowslip root in flower to set.Thus …

There is a very long history of doctors writing about their patients, but I’ve never done so, and when I’ve been asked for my reasons, I’ve never felt I have a very clear answer; after …

Remember at the start of the month when I declared my massive festive reading list.; made entirely out of Christmas books? I am now at the point in the month where I feel that 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. …

Tenney Frank (1876-1939), "Changing Conceptions of Literary and Philological Research," Journal of the History of Ideas 3.4 (October, 1942) 401-414 (at 413): In our chosen fields we shall understand our authors better if we read …

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: …

I got an ISSN for no real reason. Richard pointed out on Mastodon that you can get an ISSN for a blog as long as it’s not a personal blog. I have a personal blog …

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, …

The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Ferdia Lennon's Glorious Exploits, which was recently named the winner of this year's Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction.

Yoga for Young Adults Who Did Something Weird to Their Backs Fifteen-Minute Yoga for the Modern Woman Who Spent the First Ten Minutes of Her Free Time Having a Panic Attack (Actually Only Five Minutes …

Two years since becoming that much-elegized category of expat—the American in Paris—I’m starting to come off an early obsession: the near-constant comparison of my new cultural environment to my former one. It started benignly enough, …

The mirrors of countenance are potent beyond aesthetics, providing a reflection of the inner self. You can sense what the mind-behind-the-mirror makes of you. The accuracy of reflection is irrelevant. Whatever you approximate (they like …