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
A Guide to Interpreting Literary Journal Submission Guidelines 
Free Online Submission Interpretation: We really like you and respect you. There are diamonds in the slush pile and we want to find them. It’s virtually free for us to accept online submissions so we won’t charge you on some trumped up charge. We get undergrads and MFA students to wade through all the slush […]
Read More Brian Evenson’s Tips for MFA Applications Brian Evenson, the director of Brown University’s MFA program and an excellent writer (I gave love to his collection Fugue State), recently finished reading a wheelbarrow full of MFA applications. He saw plenty of mistakes, and handed out some free tips on Facebook. With his permission, I reprint his advice here. Tips for MFA Applications by Brian Evenson Now that […]
Read More The Novel and History Elizabeth Costello, a character in the eponymous novel by J.M. Coetzee, on the purpose of the novel and how it compares to history: “The novel, the traditional novel, she goes on to say, is an attempt to understand human fate one case at a time, to understand how it comes about that some fellow being, […]
Read More Marilynne Robinson on Intuition Marilynne Robinson, in her latest collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, explores how to create a character: For me, at least, writing consists very largely of exploring intuition. A character is really the sense of a character, embodied, attired, and given voice as he or she seems to require. Where does this […]
Read More Religious Fiction This is the way that Paul Elie, in an essay in the New York Times, describes the state of faith in novels: “Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer.” I’d call what Paul […]
Read More What Does It Mean to be an Artist? “Many years later, when he had become famous — extremely famous, truth be told — Jed would be asked numerous times what it meant, in his eyes, to be an artist. He would find nothing very interesting or original to say, except one thing, which he would consequently repeat in each interview: to be an […]
Read More Book Fight Podcast Among the many literary podcasts eking out hardscrabble lives, the Book Fight podcast has won my heart. God knows I’ve listened to a spate of book podcasters, some of them talking about the wrong books and some of them talking about the right books but doing so drearily and some of them with voices nasally enough to […]
Read More Late Blooming Writers Emma Straub on late blooming writers: The other glorious, inspiring truth is that some people are naturally late bloomers. Leonard Cohen didn’t release his first album until he was 32. Julia Child didn’t move to Paris until she was 36, and she didn’t get her famous television show until she was 51. Wallace Stevens didn’t publish any poems until he was […]
Read More Bad Book Covers The venerable Atlantic offered a list of the best 25 book covers of the year. Exclusively for your viewing pleasure, I’ve pulled together some of the worst book covers. Enjoy. 1. Police cars in space? That’s killer national security. 2. This cover definitely makes me want to buy. 3. Want to learn how to publish […]
Read More
