Blogs about Books and literature

An excerpt from Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg If you want to see a Jewish girl baptize herself all day, every day, you need only go back to the summer of 2009. With a time …

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 …

As usual, I am caught up in many things, including an article on Goethe's 1774 play Clavigo, which I am completing (the footnotes took ages) for publication. It is not a play that we in …

Red Fern Booksellers, Salina, KS (Like The Indie Bob Spot on Facebook and follow The Indie Bob Spot on X)Regular followers know that I can be swept away in any bookstore and perhaps inclined to …

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 …

I love thee nature in my inmost heartGo where I will thy truth seems from aboveGo where I will thy landscape forms a partOf heaven—e'en these fens where wood nor groveAre seen—their very nakedness I …

A perhaps silly anecdote, but: I remember seeing the typescript for “Evensong” as a child, under a different title—“The Strapless Dress”—sitting in a manuscript box on Laurie’s desk. In my mind’s eye, I can see …

This year I have been doing seasonal reading goals instead of an annual list of priority picks. My thought process was that I could a. Make it seasonal (I am a sucker for some seasonal …

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. …

Augustine, Sermons 304.3 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, cols. 1396-1397; tr. Edmund Hill): So why, O man, O woman, does your head swell so? Why, carrion skin, do you stretch yourself so? Why, stinking pus, do …

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: …

My drop-in time work used to be a lot of teaching basic skills. “Here’s how to click. Now here’s how to right-click.” Then for a time it was teaching people about software. “Here’s how a …

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, …

At El País they have the results of a large-scale survey of reading in Spain in the twenty-first century, La gran encuesta al lector español del siglo XXI. The most 'relevant' Spanish author, according to …

“President Biden issued a full and unconditional pardon of his son Hunter on Sunday night after repeatedly insisting he would not do so, using the power of his office to wave aside years of legal …

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, …

إِنَّكَ مَيِّتٌ وَإِنَّهُم مَيِّتونَ You will indeed die, and they [too] will die indeed. Surat az-Zumar 30 On the first of January in the year 15XX, I, Domingo el Monje, translator and scribe, was ordered …