This week I’m going to move on from the tiny “Up in Michigan” and stretch the short story as far as it can go in the other direction, to what is rightfully a novella, Revenge. Wikipedia tells me Jim Harrison’s work “has been compared to that of Faulkner and Hemingway” and since the Hemingway [...]
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Mysteries, December 2008–January 2009
Maritime literature, January–March 2009 Melville read-through, part I, Typee—White-Jacket, December 2009–January 2010 Whirlwind tour of Russian literature, February–May 2010 Epistolary literature, July 2009–June 2010
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Alciphron was an ancient Greek epistolographer. We don’t really know when he lived, but we have 116 fictional letters he wrote, supposed to have been by fishermen, farmers, parasites, and courtesans. I’ve only read a selection, but I really enjoyed them. They are narrative letters about daily life: yesterday’s catch, a disobedient child, party [...] Letter-writing is hardly a modern activity, and there were many epistolographers among the ancients I would like to read someday. I went with fiction: Ovid’s Heroides, a series of fictional letters between mythic figures. The first group are all single letters from a woman to a man; these are followed by three exchanges. The [...] So, it’s Sunday again, and I’m sure everyone will be pleased to hear that this week, I really, seriously, not joking this time, for reals, finally, will be getting into some epistolary awesomeness. Part of the delay was due to the extreme nonawesomeness that is Pamela. When it takes me almost a month to [...] …this book. Real posting will resume…later. The reason for A.E. Hotchner’s op-ed in the Times yesterday was news to me, though maybe not to you: BOOKSTORES are getting shipments of a significantly changed edition of Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece, “A Moveable Feast,” first published posthumously by Scribner in 1964. This new edition, also published by Scribner, has been extensively reworked by [...] The Keepsake feels so unlike other work by Kirsty Gunn because of how indoors it is. Not only does it take place almost entirely indoors, but it’s about being shut up indoors, in a single room in fact. But we see the same interest in light and place as usual. First there is the [...] I’ve read Kirsty Gunn’s novels in mostly antichronological order, but I’ll write about the last two the right way round. Rain, her first, was the last I read, but I think that really contributed to my appreciation of it. How often do we go back and read a newly-beloved author’s back catalogue only to [...] |
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