Magnificent Octopus

"Drop this! I won't fight with you. I won't be made ridiculous." "Ah, you won't?" hissed the Gascon. ...

First, let me say that this is my favourite of all NYRB Classics book covers to date. The image (Susan Bower, Downhill in a Pram ) is wonder...

Inspired by NPR's recent list of top 100 science fiction and fantasy books , a coworker and I have been comparing notes on our respectiv...

When Jake and I were first married — after the three eldest children had been taken away — we lived together in the evenings. Like actors, o...

I'm sure Hubert didn't see me, but it still hit me like a bullet — his black coat from the back and his fair neck — and I had to thi...

I'm very excited to be finally starting A Dance with Dragons ! I was pretty ambivalent about book 4 ( A Feast for Crows ) for the first ...

So they have courses teaching you foreign languages and ballroom dancing and etiquette and cooking. But there are no classes to learn how to...

In the moonlight, there was an edged beauty to my mother. The round woman looked glamorous against the barren debris, the garbage, and the g...

He couldn't go on walking until three in the morning, so he stopped along the way at cafes. A few people would be standing around a hors...

It was still raining. Paris was gray, dirty, and confused — a nightmare. It was crammed with people who had no idea where they were going; c...

What I've been listening to this week, the perfect accompaniment to heat and wind and storms and confusion.

It turns out that How Fiction Works , by James Wood, is not at all what I expected it to be. 1. It's very readable. 2. There's a lot...

Book 3 of the Game of Thrones books (more properly the series is known as A Song of Fire and Ice , but I don't know anyone who calls it ...

ET: The Extraterrestrial "It's nice because it's happy and sad at the same time. But you know how it's going to end. How c...

This book is about Cain: "cain is the man who killed his brother, cain is the man born to witness the unspeakable, cain is the man who ...

Crying over spilt milk is not as pointless as people say, it is in a way instructive because it shows the true scale of the frivolity of cer...

"I think what we do is intuitive, but it's also essentially about observation." He was looking down at his cup as if he was re...

In the turret room, as he opened the door of the wardrobe, he looked at Alayaya curiously. "What do you do while I'm gone?" ...

The B52s closed the jazz festival tonight. I don't know that they're jazz, but they are jazzy. Glad I was there.