Magnificent Octopus

The Diary of Edward the Hamster 1990-1990 , by Miriam Elia and Ezra Elia, was waiting for me under the Christmas tree. Friday, September 26...

"Leontii Sergeyevich" remarked Ivan Vasilievich, "has brought me a play." "Whose play?" asked the old woman,...

Christmas Freilachs , by the Angstones. Pretty much my favourite Christmas medley ever, capturing the chaotic spirit of the season. I bo...

"I am writing the story," she says. "The story of you, and me, and the Pigoons, and everyone. I am writing about how we put S...

...if unusual

One of the most beautiful books I read this year was Azazeel , by Youssef Ziedan, an Egyptian scholar who specializes in Arabic and Islamic ...

Based on Robert Sheckley's short story "Seventh Victim." ( via ) See also Movies and Books Like The Hunger Games (full t...

I went crazy for Beethoven quite unexpectedly. Witold Gombrowicz on Beethoven : Quartets! Sixteen quartets! It is one thing to dip occas...

I've completed my first massive open online course (MOOC). It was weird at the start, but it didn't take long to get my bearings. ...

The Financial Lives of the Poets , by Jess Walter, is one of the funniest novels I've read in some time, but also, as you might intuit f...

What a remarkable lady! Last night I saw Margaret Atwood at the Rialto. One can't always be sure what one is going to get when an auth...

light Think of bars that cease to exist the closer you get to them. Before you feel their coldness, then their obstinacy, briefly it wil...

Why do so many Russian writers need to make their protagonist a victim or pain-bearer? Why this fixation with self-flagellation? With guilt?...

So I make one phone call, and just like that, we're eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piec...

We saw the circus last weekend. Cirkopolis C'est la quête identitaire d'un travailleur solitaire. C'est l'obsession de r...

There are lots of great things about Helena, but when the Nivea commercial came on while we were watching TV, I had to ask her, what did sh...

The Lessing Woman : Fans of British Novelist Doris Lessing talk about a composite character called the Lessing Woman in much the same way a...

I am enthralled by The Paradise. This television series pushes all the right buttons for me, though I can't identify them all. Music is ...

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over ...

In our age there has been much talk about the importance of doubt for science and scholarship, but what doubt is to science, irony is to per...