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
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
As February was winding down, I realised it had been some time since I picked up a book about writing and, so, I reached for The Writer’s Library (2020), which I found remaindered last autumn. It’s a set of interviews conducted by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager which sounds
