Magnificent Octopus

Skulk turned right onto the Mile, up for a couple of hundred metres and then left, onto the George IV Bridge above the dark chasm of the Cow...

From the entry concerning the secrets of St. Bartholomew's the Greater, featuring bad puns and briny floods and heralded as a rare survi...

Juhan was wearing skinny black jeans, a black T-shirt, and a massive black leather jacket with jangly silver zippers, which hung from his sh...

 Edinburgh rain was like a judgement. It soaked into the bones, into the structures of the buildings, into the memories of the tourists. It...

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl , by Mona Awad, is a breezy read that becomes profoundly sad the instant you step back from it. The novel...

Near his flat, he passed a little grocery shop outside which were stacked crates of milk and morning rolls. The owner had complained in priv...

This was the year Beyoncé wore a dress made entirely from the sounds of thunder and lightning. The Painter watched from the couch with his d...

So, where did all this start? Well, it all started when Tikhonov nailed his fourteen propositions to the door of the Yeliseiko village sovie...

Another Simenon novel, another bullet to my head. The Hand , by Georges Simenon, is true to form. Ah, the mind games old married couples p...

I found a book at the bookstore, and I wanted it, I wanted it badly. But the more I turned it over, the more I realized I didn't want it...

Dinner over, he took the empty plastic tray from his hotpot back into the kitchen and dumped it in the bin. He was supposed to separate out ...

Of course, to commence our investigation of hiccups, we must first call them forth: either an sich , in the terminology of Immanuel Kant, wh...

I have been reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , by Yuval Noah Harari . I blame my mother. In fact, I hold her single-handedly re...

Life is busy of late. My reading is very piecemeal. Somehow I've managed to get myself to this point where, unnaturally for me, I'm ...

On the morning of the second day, he opened his eyes and found himself lying in the most comfortable bed he had ever encountered. It was ...

When I was seventeen, I had a very good year. In fact, it may even have started when I was sixteen. I developed a crush on an older man. Eve...

It's Independent Bookstore Day , and I feel I ought to spend my day patronizing some. Truth is, there aren't too many in these parts...

Montreal's Blue Metropolis Literary Festival is on, and a few events have caught my attention. Earlier this week I attended a lecture...

Unpacking after one of Lewis's infrequent shopping expeditions was an adventure. Lewis had a theory that there was something secretly cr...

"So here is the question. Given that the information you have is necessarily imperfect. Given that the history of events is necessarily...