Magnificent Octopus

With Theft , by Peter Carey, being the first , and Last Evenings on Earth , by Roberto Bolaño, being the second , and the connections betwee...

Right. So where was I? The first book was Peter Carey's Theft . Which was pretty good. 2. Roberto Bolaño. Everybody's talking about...

Which have nothing to do with each other, other than my having read them all recently one after the other, my having desperately wanted to r...

I make the mistake of going to the post office at lunch. The post office at Ogilvy department store. I don't recall there being a post ...

1. As J-F is attending a conference this week, I've been on daycare detail. The first day of drop-off, I joke with Helena as we approach...

He told me all this as we drank tequila in that cheap restaurant in one of the poor suburbs of Irapuato, which, needless to say, didn't ...

A poet can endure anything. Which amounts to saying that a human being can endure anything. Except that it's not true: there are obvious...

It was a hard morning. At 2PM I stand up for myself. The editorial changes to the online program can wait; give me 15 minutes to grab someth...

The Patrick Hamilton revival , in the Boston Globe: Hamilton's novels are filled with drinking, murder, madness, unrequited passion, lon...

Before Oprah and her minions, and Cormac McCarthy himself, sway me to the contrary, I just have to say, for the record: I did not care so mu...

I am a Murakami virgin. (Gasp!) Or, was, until a couple weeks ago. Oh — apart from a story in the New Yorker I liked (years ago), after whic...

See the Guardian and BBC : But asked by a member of the audience if it was men who waged war, she replied: "I have not noticed that wo...

Having a regular job, I find, is really cutting into my personal time. But millions of people do this, right? Hold jobs and have families an...

1. That we watch far too much Doctor Who and that Helena has developed a crush: Helena tells me her dream the other morning, that she was at...

The introduction by DJ Taylor to a single-volume reprint of Patrick Hamilton's Gorse trilogy to be published by Black Spring next month ...

I thoroughly enjoyed The Pesthouse , by Jim Crace (but then, in this household any apocalypse and its aftermath is a source of fascination)....

We know Bill Clinton is good at crossword puzzles; he's pretty good at writing them too. His first set of clues appeared in the New York...

Preamble: I'd written most of what follows days ago, and I'll let it stand without the further elaboration I'd intended, but it ...