He got up and sat on the edge of the bedstead with his back to the window. “It’s better not to sleep at all,” he decided. There was a cold damp draught from the window, however; without getting up he drew the blanket over him and wrapped himself in it. He was not thinking of anything and did not want to think. But one image rose after another, incoherent scraps of thought without beginning or end passed through his mind. He sank into drowsiness. Perhaps the cold, or the dampness, or the dark, or the wind that howled under the window and tossed the trees roused a sort of persistent craving for the fantastic. He kept dwelling on images of flowers, he fancied a charming flower garden, a bright, warm, almost hot day, a holiday—Trinity day. A fine, sumptuous country cottage in the English taste overgrown with fragrant flowers, with flower beds going round the house; the porch, wreathed in climbers, was surrounded with beds of roses. A light, cool staircase, carpeted with rich rugs, was decorated with rare plants in china pots. He noticed particularly in the windows nosegays of tender, white, heavily fragrant narcissus bending over their bright, green, thick long stalks. He was reluctant to move away from them, but he went up the stairs and came into a large, high drawing-room and again everywhere—at the windows, the doors on to the balcony, and on the balcony itself—were flowers. The floors were strewn with freshly-cut fragrant hay, the windows were open, a fresh, cool, light air came into the room. The birds were chirruping under the window, and in the middle of the room, on a table covered with a white satin shroud, stood a coffin. The coffin was covered with white silk and edged with a thick white frill; wreaths of flowers surrounded it on all sides. Among the flowers lay a girl in a white muslin dress, with her arms crossed and pressed on her bosom, as though carved out of marble. But her loose fair hair was wet; there was a wreath of roses on her head. The stern and already rigid profile of her face looked as though chiselled of marble too, and the smile on her pale lips was full of an immense unchildish misery and sorrowful appeal. Svidrigaïlov knew that girl; there was no holy image, no burning candle beside the coffin; no sound of prayers: the girl had drowned herself. She was only fourteen, but her heart was broken. And she had destroyed herself, crushed by an insult that had appalled and amazed that childish soul, had smirched that angel purity with unmerited disgrace and torn from her a last scream of despair, unheeded and brutally disregarded, on a dark night in the cold and wet while the wind howled
The Blog
Will Self: The Book of Dave 
So the latest hyper-idiosyncratic vision of Will Self is out in the form of The Book of Dave. Summary: Deranged cabbie pens manuscript, buries the metal tablets in the backyard, and five hundred years later, after the apocalyptic flood, the tablets are unearthed and become the template for a new religion (sounds Mormonistic, but in […]
Read More Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners I’m very taken by Kelly Link’s new collection of short stories, Magic (for beginners), not the least because the title implies the genre: she writes otherworldly, magical stories, lying somewhere between Amiee Bender and Haruki Murakami. To read a story from the collection, check out The Faery Handbag (which won the 2005 Hugo and Locus […]
Read More The Curtain: Milan Kundera Publisher’s Weekly couldn’t give a more enthusiastic thumbs up for Kundera’s last book in a trilogy on the poetics of the novel: “It’s not often that a work comes along that so perfectly distills an approach to art that it realigns the way an art form is understood.” For early takes, check out this early […]
Read More Richard Dawkins The God Delusion So Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is #4 on Amazon.com right now and #8 on the New York Times Bestseller list. His shill is simple: Belief in God is irrational and religion has caused irreparable damage to society. Unfortunately, his ideas are a bit too simple. Marilynne Robinson, in an essay in the November issue […]
Read More Mix Tape #4 An irony, of course, was that as soon as he’d surrendered – possibly as soon as he’d confessed to his depression, almost certainly by the time he showed her his hand and she put a proper bandage on it, and absolutely no later than the moment at which, with a locomotive as long and hard […]
Read More The Road of Cormac McCarthy So I just finished McCarthy’s The Road last night. I didn’t mean to finish it last night, I meant to start it, but by midnight I was convinced that it was good enough to lose sleep over. And the rest of the book certainly didn’t disappoint. Here’s a few bullet-pointed thoughts: The most common dialogue […]
Read More Twilight of the Superheroes: Deborah Eisenberg In Deborah Eisenberg’s latest collection of short stories, Twilight of the Superheroes, the reader is always catching up. In more than half of the stories she starts by throwing you in the middle of a scene, sometimes by way of a line of dialogue, and introducing three or more characters in the first sentence or […]
Read More Janet Fitch Reading in LA Despite that Paint it Black is a book with suicide at its center, the talk at the Los Angeles Central Library was refreshingly funny. Rachel Resnick kept it light by cracking jokes and by her repertoire of hyperbolic expressions (laughing face, shocked face, impressed face). Janet Fitch was composed, thoughtful, wearing a black leather skirt […]
Read More (Not) The Best Christian Short Stories: Bret Lott, Editor I kind of liked some aspects of Bret Lott’s Jewel (the lyrical voice, the emotional connection to the characters), so when I saw he had edited a collection, I decided to give it a try. The title made me wonder if anyone was creating good literary works that dealt with transcendent themes, but Lott terrible […]
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