These stories turn on moments in which their characters are yanked from their everyday existences. That ordinary, day-to-day life? It's there, and the reader understands its dimensions, but the focus is elsewhere. "Hard, steady work, and no money in it either. When there was fish, there was no price for
One might think that writers of bookish books would go on and on, produce vast treatises on their love of books and literature, but many bookish books are slim volumes. Consider Carlos Maria Dominguez's The House of Paper (2004), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude (1976; Trans.
In which I chat about reading Dr. Brinkley's Tower in a single day. (You can't build a tower that quickly, but you can read about it.) Admittedly, I shuffled this volume amongst my stack of current reads for weeks before I started reading. (There is always a book in there that
