It may sound incomprehensible—senseless, Constance Garnett would have put it, as she did in her translation of The Brothers Karamazov—but while the rest of the world may dread the return of the prolonged hostile stare-down known in the last...
Fascinating: two gifted women storytellers, feeding on cataclysm. The American Laura Van den Berg, in Find Me, looks to the future, more or less; she imagines a plague that decimates an otherwise familiar United States.
First, a distinction. When I employ the term academic in what follows, I will not mean the first definition, the technical one: individuals who teach college students. I will mean the second definition, the sullied one: individuals for whom...
One night, she turns the novel’s last page. This is all— small house, plain street, some trees, sweet and irksome neighbors, dishes, bills, water leaks,
Though she received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for a collection of deeply personal poems, one of Claudia Emerson’s finest gifts was for inhabiting the voices of others, creating essentially a Spoon RiverAnthology for rural Virginia.
My four-year-old nieces love the picture-book versions of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, which extract small stories from the canon, representing them simply for young readers.
