Lorna Sage writes beautifully about Djuna Barnes and her 1937 novel Nightwood in her essay collection, Moments of Truth. She describes how Barnes presents “the Paris of abject carnival, a kind of human menagerie” and then Sage gives just a peek of how it was “written, rewritten and wrenched
Midway through 2024, I enthused about Casey Plett’s On Community which includes a discussion of how Plett often feels the term is too slippery but it’s hard to find a suitable replacement. Sometimes I feel as though it means the opposite of what I want it to mean, or
When I first read Moments of Truth, when it was new, I’d only read a two or three of the authors/books she discusses. And reading it was more like skimming, because I was just as spoiler-phobic then. This time, the essays have felt more inviting, more comfortable and, at least
Growing up, reading was a solitary activity. Even when I was lucky enough to live near someone else who had a similar connection to books and stories, we never did that together: we played. We might swap books, under the best of circumstances, but we never had our own
Here’s a glimpse of some recent reads which lend themselves more to sampling, in a handful of reading sessions, than gobbling in longer periods of time. Not the books which require a sink-into-your-seat focus, rather the ones which afford the opportunity to window-gaze between pages or single-sitting reads. Like
