Category Archives: Uncategorized

“Morning” in The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman wonderful description of awakening… As the sun moved up the sky, it came past the rock above and touched her hair, and she began to stir, and when the sunlight reached her … Continue reading →

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell entertains the reader with footnotes thus situating the reader as a type of scholar and thus kin to the magician protagonists of the novel (they read a lot of books, annotated books no … Continue reading →

Edmund White The Burning Library “Nabokov: Beyond Parody” Whereas some Russian Formalists […] argued that parody is a way of disowning the past in an act of literary warfare, in Nabokov’s case we see that parody can be the fondest … Continue reading →

Bruce Sterling Schismatrix composed in 1984 [Sterling writes in the preface dated 1995 that he wrote the stories eleven years ago] could be read through the lens of the contemporary concern over contagion and the exchange of bodily fluids. Look: … Continue reading →

Jean H. Hagstrum Eros and Vision: the Restoration to Romanticism has a generous note to the work of an other scholar. It is a classy reference. Deserves to be quoted in full, an example of the threads spun from one … Continue reading →

Peter Kline The Everyday Genius: Restoring Children’s Natural Joy of Learning — and Yours Too Children are usually comfortable with expressions of strong emotion. When someone is crying they will give warm and affectionate attention. They know all about crying … Continue reading →

George Painter rewards the faithful reader of his biography of Marcel Proust. He elevates words of consolation from their specific and local context and turns them, by citing them at the end of a chapter called “The Prize”, into an … Continue reading →

There is a fine ending to the first chapter of The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis. It underplays the ironies to come. After an evening of banqueting, the couple was escorted to Bertrande’s marriage bed. Into their … Continue reading →

It is a way of approaching the world in all its hermetic glory. It is a character describing another character’s writing. In Julia Kristeva’s The Samurai, Olga is describing a commentary she wrote about Sinteuil’s novel, Exodus. Sinteuil saw a … Continue reading →