Magnificent Octopus

To be human the film suggested, was to step into the full flurry and motion of all humanity: to bear the weight of circumstances without fli...

Today I read the saddest poem, flipping through journals at the magazine shop. It brought tears to my eyes. I stopped breathing, and my hear...

My vacation reading went off the rails pretty early on. The book I was reading in Edinburgh was set in Edinburgh , but as soon as we settled...

Electronic music had just begun to appear at that time — Pierre Schaeffer, Klaus Schulze — an abstract music of galactic desolation that enr...

One aspect of Vipassana still bothered him, indeed had come to bother him more and more, to the point where he was now ready to stop meditat...

Spotted underground: I suppose storage services have been around for some time, but this ad brings a fresh perspective. My daughter is co...

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 ...