From “Sleep”, Haruki Murakami
It’ been a while since I blogged about the literature of sleep which was formerly a recurrent theme here. So here is the opening of a Haruki Murakami story call…
Category: fiction
From “The State”, a short story by Tommy Orange
From The New Yorker, drawn from Orange’s forthcoming novel There There Before you were born, you were a head and a tail in a milky pool—a swimmer. You were a…
“the enemy of creativity in the world today is that so much thinking is done for you” = J G Ballard on Creativity
A while back I reposted an essay I wrote on Nthposition.com (which is now offline) in which featured a quote from J G Ballard: “Cyril Connolly said that the greatest…
A story for Christmas – F. Scott Fitzgerald , “The Lost Decade”
When I was 14 or of 15 the Penguin Classics editions of F Scott Fitzgerald short stories made an indelible impression – to some degree the covers (which forged a…
“For my sins”
In Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor expertly sketches the lives of the elderly long-term residents of the Claremont Hotel, a somwhat shabby-genteel premises on the Cromwell Road which…
“an author whose books were marvellous but rather the same” – Elizabeth Taylor and Andrei Makine
I have just begun reading Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippincote’s (not, it feels obligatory to point out, not that Elizabeth Taylor. From Valerie Martin‘s introduction: Though I never met either…
Benjamin Parzybok . “The Hole in the Reef”, Reckoning #1
From Reckoning “an annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice”, comes this tight little story about a father and son, the ocean, and waste by Benjamin Parzybok. A couple…
Cornelius Medvei: “We don’t take characters and develop them; we set ourselves writing puzzles and try to solve them”
The Making of Mr Bolsover is a novel which it is relatively easy to find critical words phrases to describe – mock-heroic, deadpan, quietly subversive – yet each leaves one…
Séamus Sweeney 