Blogs about Books and literature

I occupy a corner of the internet where I’m largely secluded from a cis audience’s reaction to I Saw the TV Glow, the second feature from director Jane Schoenbrun. Instead, I see trans people dunk …

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 …

Tin Can Mailman, Arcata, CA(Like The Indie Bob Spot on Facebook and follow The Indie Bob Spot on X)I love the name of this bookstore and the story behind it. The original owner spent some …

Asinkrono: Isang Nobela by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles (De La Salle University Publishing House, 2021) People say the novel is a way of imparting knowledge. Well, maybe. But for me it is more a way of …

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 …

Cheerd by the rural objects as we passTo were trees shadows keepeth green the grassChecking intrusions of the summer sunsThere drop us down close were the river runsIn sight of rural sounds & pleasing strifeThat …

His first view of the outside was through the small, fan-shaped window of the basement apartment. He would climb up on the table and spend hours peering through the bars at the legs and feet …

I know, I’m so late to this series! I have been meaning to read this for years but I wanted to read each book during the appropriate season…and of course kept forgetting which book was …

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. …

Homer, Odyssey 20.25-30 (tr. George Herbert Palmer): As when a man near a great glowing fire turns to and fro a sausage, full of fat and blood, anxious to have it quickly roast; so to …

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: …

Mist in the valley of East Randolph, from the National Archives on Flickr Commons This started out as a cranky email and then I decided to write this up instead and be (somewhat) constructive. I …

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 July issue of Asymptote is now available -- a ton of good material for your weekend reading. Not least: Sarah Gear has An interview with Georgi Gospodinov -- the author of Time Shelter (etc.).

“Will Chamberlain, a conservative lawyer who worked on Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, posted on X that Harris ‘shouldn’t be President’ because she doesn’t have biological children; ‘becoming a step-parent to older teenagers doesn’t count,’ he …

Always he appeared immaculate, always elegant—when Duke Ellington took the stage at Carnegie Hall in January of 1943 for the premier of his Black, Brown and Beige symphony it was in white tie and tailed …

Dad was on a first name basis with the inimitable character actor Seymour Cassel, who lived next door to my grandmother in a one-bedroom apartment on the 11th floor of the Santa Monica Shores apartment …