Magnificent Octopus

I started writing this post about a year ago. Mostly, it was about Helena coming into her own as a person, being her own little girl, and ab...

Her mother was a shopkeeper who had an open-air stall selling Catalan notions and textiles in the market plaza. The market plaza: a great qu...

One More Year , by Sana Krasikov, is a collection of 8 short stories covering the contemporary immigrant experience of Eastern Europeans. (B...

If anyone cares and doesn't already know, Paul Auster has a new book out: Man in the Dark . I care a little bit, but the truth is, I...

I've spent a lot of time this summer looking up, with my head in the clouds some might say. We play the cloud game on long drives. Mostl...

Who in hell is Théophile Gautier ? "Posterity will judge Gautier to be one of the masters of writing, not only in France but also in Eu...

I have mixed feelings about it. Truthfully, I hated the idea at first. But this battle I lost early on, and I never found ground to retake. ...

In the introduction to my collection of Anne Hébert's later novels , Mavis Gallant writes: The French author Marguerie Yourcenar believe...

She tells me, "You have to try to see it through the eyes of a child." I argue that the child already sees everything through the ...

I've been antsy this week, for numerous reasons, and having trouble settling on something to read. I've been reading Rilke this summ...

"Can we go down to the ocean, Mommy?" What, right now? Is she not enjoying our cottage weekend? Does she mean on a subsequent vaca...

A couple weeks ago we made an evening of Shakespeare in the park . I understood nothing. I still have pretty much no idea what The Tempest i...

Dear Lou, This morning in a moment of great brightness it became clear to me. I have been living for years in bad conscience and shallow str...

I've been meaning to read Solaris forever. I saw the Tarkovsky film adaptation at a rep cinema half a lifetime ago. I fell asleep. I in...

Carla Bruni sings Michel Houellebecq. I heard Carla Bruni's new album playing in some shop or other last week, instantly recognizable, ...

Uncle Cleans Up , by JP Martin and illustrated by Quentin Blake, is the follow-up to Uncle (both now published in The New York Review Child...

It was Laurie Anderson I became acquainted with first. "Those are pearls that were his eyes." Years later, I learned a few things...

Days go by. There are days I spend my lunch hour wandering across McGill campus, a school I once intended to attend but never did. Did you k...

Michel Houellebecq has produced his own film adaptation of his book, The Possibility of an Island . Here's a comment with at least a su...

It is as if whatever I truly receive falls too deeply into me, falls, falls for years and in the end I lack the strength to lift it out of m...