Magnificent Octopus

I had always liked reading, but lately I had started reading in a different kind of way. When I opened a book now, I was seized with despera...

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read, and at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other. ...

Proofs Death will not correct a single line of verse she is no proof-reader she is no sympathetic lady editor a bad metaphor is imm...

I'm reading Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals , in anticipation of seeing the author next week. I'm only half...

If any of us were as well taken care of as the sentences of Henry James, we'd never long for another, never wander away: where else woul...

As you may have noticed, in general members of book clubs regard the characters inside books exactly the way they regard the characters outs...

The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World "even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination" ...

Beethoven's music is Hegelian philosophy: it is at the same time truer than this; i.e., it contains the conviction that the self replica...

Learning to Read If I had to look up every fifth or sixth word so what. I looked them up. I had nowhere important to be. My father was...

The end is the best part. After the stop. I love the end. Sometimes I start chanting that bit spontaneously. "I am resplendent in div...

Lola's eyes gleamed with pleasure and interest as she listened to my tales of the cosmopolitans, all of them true but all fictions never...

The Circle , by Dave Eggers. I mean, all this stuff you're involved in, it's all gossip. It's people talking about each other b...

The launch of the festival program is like Christmas for me. I look forward to it every year. Then I sit with my various coloured pens, mark...

Orson Welles reads Kafka. "Every man strives to attain the law."

"It's not that I'm not social. I'm social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme s...

The Letter Killers Club , by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, is a strange little excuse for a novel. I want to love it, but I don't quite. F...

Last week I went to see Man Booker International Prize-nominated author and creative writing professor Josip Novakovich and two-time Booker ...

We are living in 1937 and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our...

"You know, Goethe once described Shakespeare (to Eckermann) as a wildly overgrown tree that — for two hundred years straight — had stif...

I love art. As the saying goes, I don't know much about art, but I know what I like. Often I feel that I don't have the vocabulary t...