If I were to witness a murder, I figure I’d be like that woman in the Swedish drama “The Breakthrough” who sees the perpetrator straight on but, later, cannot recall a single facial feature. So Saunders’ point about the previous story, about Turgenev’s physical descriptions in “The Singers”, didn’t
Even though I nearly always follow Mavis Gallant’s advice about reading short stories (in short, don’t rush), something about the way I’m reading stories this year has changed. Or something about the rest of my reading has changed. Choosing more responsively has made my stack more unruly than usual.
In Boy George’s 2023 autobiography Karma, he says: “Having an opinion is always bad for business.” He’s got lots of them himself, but there’s he’s describing—and celebrating—how Taylor Swift took a political stance against homophobia when some warned her it was bad for business. Author Louise Penny has spoken
Seasonally, my reading is a little all over the place. On Saturday we had a full day of snow. On Sunday a full day of rain. On Monday we couldn’t open the back doors. The front door was protected, but the walkway and steps a solid sheet of ice:
Mavis Gallant is sitting “in her apartment on Rue Jean Ferrandi” when, in a “voice gentle yet commanding”, she says “There are two kinds of writers to me, the Tolstoy and the Dostoevsky.” With this Russian project underway, I sat up a little straighter. “And they’re both extraordinary,” she
