Magnificent Octopus

Without agreeing to do so, we made it a thing not to call anything by its name, not to talk of cocks and vaginas and not to make love the wa...

The time of my adolescence is slow, made up of large gray blocks and sudden humps of color, green or red or purple. The blocks don't hav...

I wondered whether, if I spent long enough with it, the machine would distill the essence of my work out of me the way I had never quite man...

The mushrooms glowed brighter, and she thought perhaps later she might touch them, running her hands against the wall and settling her face ...

I didn't know I needed to read this book. Three , by D.A. Mishani , was the perfect antidote to what had been a disappointing reading we...

Buying things requires at least a rudimentary level of optimism — indeed, why buy the most recent critical edition of Henry James's comp...

Meanwhile, I'd taken my courage in both hands, turned my first trick, at home, a chubby little guy, about sixty, who chain-smoked untipp...

That was the first chapter. The second chapter is next. It is loosely related to the first, but this isn't some perfectly sequential mas...

little scratch  by  Rebecca Watson  was a brilliant surprise, an unexpected one-sitting read.  instead I think          about art galleries ...

There certainly is what doctors call a "migraine personality," and that personality tends to be ambitious, inward, intolerant of e...

She walked through the market stands with her new stride, at once lazy and confident, loose and firm, looking at everything and knowing she...

In a man, not liking women is a pose. In a woman, not liking men is a pathology. Sounds a little like Atwood's, "Men are afraid tha...

The ways of the heart cannot be explained. It does what it wants. This morning I woke up and allowed myself a moment of wistfulness, I watch...

Little Eyes , by Samanta Schweblin, was a real treat for me this week,  inspiring the kind of just-one-more-page feeling that kept me up pas...

First published in 1932,  The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma , by Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz, is well known in Poland, commonly believed to have be...

 Yesterday, on the 212th day of German lessons, we went back into lockdown.  We knew it was coming. I felt it coming. I haven't been sle...

Madam Józefina Przełęska had woken up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. By ten o'clock, this fact had become a universally ackn...

It has begun. The second wave of the pandemic. I keep thinking of it as a sociological phenomenon rather than a biological one, like fifth-w...

Sometimes I felt that my mind was a soft cloud of air around me, taking in whatever flew in, spinning around, and delivering it out into the...