Magnificent Octopus

Mystery lingered in the air like the scent of a scorched book. As a teenager I tried reading H.P. Lovecraft — my big brother wouldn't sh...

Once, after she'd been introduced to the tape recorder in our apartment and told that you could play back a text or a piece of music, sh...

According to the back cover copy of my trashy-looking mass market paperback (exactly as pictured here), The Accomplices is Simenon's p...

About a year ago now I was packing up house. I whittled down my possessions to those I truly wanted to possess, those that I would freely in...

"The water's boiling." Her voice had no weight to it, like feathers. It was neither gloomy nor absent-minded, as might be expe...

For a book purportedly about a library, The Invisible Library , by Genevieve Cogman, has very little librarying going on here. "I and ...

Yesterday for lunch I went to the bookstore. Food for thought, food for the soul. Usually I just like to browse, just being in a bookstore b...

If my library were peopled with creatures rather than books, it would house polar bear memoirists, insurgent dogs, poetry-spurting robots,...

Wolfgang's mouth smelled of lies. There are different sorts of lies, and each one has its own smell. This particular lie smelled of susp...

I don't know how to say what I have to say to you. If I say, "I find that my choice is whether to not be or to be," it'll ...

In the summer of '94 I was passing through Wrocław. A friend of mine from Kraków was in town, and we arranged to meet one afternoon in t...

A time for weeping... Who by Fire? And who by fire, who by water, Who in the sunshine, who in the night time, Who by high ordeal, who b...

"One day, I found a big book buried deep in the ground. I opened it, but all the pages were blank. Then to my surprise, it started writ...

"Were you ever in Canada?" I asked him. "No." "Do you know what sort of country it is?" "A very col...

I seem to be a little out of sync with the rest of the world in my impressions of The Girl on the Train , by Paula Hawkins. We're all i...

Noble people don't do things for the money, they simply have money, and that's what allows them to be noble. They don't really h...

Stop Global Warming and Save the Polar Bears! The polar bear speaks up, and it makes me want a bicycle: "The bicycle is beyond all ...

The theatre class at the correctional facility has a rule about swearing: the prisoners must "limit" themselves to the curses used...

I didn't think that The Best Kind of People , by Zoe Whittall, would be my kind of book. I'm still not sure. I received a review...

The 2016 Nobel prize in literature will be announced Thursday, October 13. New Republic gives a rundown of who's in the running, in f...