Magnificent Octopus

In my first days in Jerusalem, I thought about the secret of pilgrimage and asked myself what drove me out of my native country and brought ...

Famous men read famous poetry . I am partial to Ben Whishaw's reading of La Belle Dame Sans Merci: Other standouts on BlackBook...

Sleep is a divine gift without which the world would go raving mad. Everything in the universe sleeps, wakes up and sleeps again, except our...

Yes, she thought, this is one reason I always come back to these beds, because intimacy changes the scale of the universe, folding down the ...

The first time I saw Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds I was a teenager, and I saw it at the rep cinema, on a big screen. It terrified me. ...

"You know what I like most about this city?" "What?" Will asked. "The tubs," Flats said. "The tubs?...

Vidot made a small tsk-tsk sound. He never liked to share information about cases he was investigating. He was relieved that the tale of the...

So begins Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time . "It was a dark and stormy night." What kind of deprived childhood did I ...

The most ridiculous thing I read this summer was a Doctor Who book. And it wasn't even a "proper" Doctor Who book. The Angel...

I spent the better part of the weekend in bed reading Louise Penny's How the Light Gets In . Most of the other part of the weekend I spe...

"Yes, a rack of galoshes. I have been living in this house since 1903. And from then until March 1917 there was not one case — let me u...

Had the Chief Inspector been blindfolded he could have described the familiar shop. The walls were lined with bookcases filled with hardcove...

Polish poet Tomasz Różycki is featured in Words without Borders' Black Markets issue. Paweł Huelle writes " A Letter to a Young P...

Where Tigers Are at Home , by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, is a massive, sprawling monster of a book. I have been reading it since March, and ...

"I want to ask you" — here the woman pulled a number of coloured magazines wet with snow, from out of the front of her tunic — ...

Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam includes a marvelous typography note honouring Walbaum, #17 on a list of the 100 best typefaces of all time...

I felt my soul was dying and I didn't know what to do. Martin said this was called "growing up." I read Iris Has Free Time , ...

Some of the things I've been reading and thinking about this week... On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs , by David Graeber, Strike! Ma...

Everything you've heard about John Williams' Stoner is true. ( Bryan Appleyard's review lists out many of the responses to thi...

Maybe I'm not quite dead now because I can feel how boring all this is. Sławomir Mrożek died last week. Some 19 years ago I spent a su...