bibliographing

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 thought [...]

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 invitations. Like [...]

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 verse letters [...]

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 finish a [...]

Didn’t take me long in my story series to get to Hemingway, did it? Well, I won’t pretend I’m surprised. I did post about him earlier this week as well, but in fact, I re-read “Up in Michigan” (1923) because I’d been discussing with the consumption partner the Michigan stories, which he likes best. I [...]

…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 a grandson [...]

This week was the first anniversary of this blog, and I think that makes it a good time to try out something new. I love short stories, and while I do read short story collections from time to time I feel like I could be reading a lot more individual short stories. So starting now [...]

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 single room [...]

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 be [...]