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
Writers Are Terrible Monsters 
Colm Toibin on writers: “You have to be a terrible monster to write. Someone might have told you something they shouldn’t have told you, and you have to be prepared to use it because it will make a great story. You have to use it even though the person is identifiable. If you can’t do […]
Read More David Foster Wallace Postcard David Foster Wallace wrote a postcard to a fan, and the fan writes about moving from initial disappointment to a gradual realization of what Wallace was trying to say. Yes, even DFW postcards can be deep: “[David Foster Wallace] was telling me what I already knew but had forgotten over the long years of struggling for […]
Read More The First Chapter’s Last Line Jonathan Franzen was wrong about many things. About Oprah’s book club. About the value of Twitter. About the quality of Freedom. But he was not wrong about Paula Fox. Franzen championed Fox (no relation to your proprietor) early in his career, before he published The Corrections, talking her up in essays in Harper’s and writing […]
Read More Literary Workout Writers, get your benchpress on.
Read More D.G. Myers Hates Creative Writers Last week the National Book Award nominees came out, and D.G. Myers hated them. Really hated them. He said “don’t bother” with Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, that Dave Eggers is a middlebrow novelist, that Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is derivative. I won’t argue with his dismissal of the selections. But I will argue with why he […]
Read More Alex Epstein Micro-fiction Alex Epstein published seven micro-fictions over at Recommended Reading last week, and I love this one about a writer: Due to a tiny crack in the time-space continuum, E. received a remarkably polite rejection letter from a publisher for a novel he had not written. He threw the letter in the trash and forgot about […]
Read More A Celebration of Embellished Prose A celebration of embellished prose at the New York Times: The novelists I find myself attracted to are those who cannot resist the extra adjective, the additional image, the scale-tipping clause. It feels necessary to assert and celebrate this, for we are living in puritanical times. The contemporary preference seems to be for the economical, […]
Read More Why Mo Yan Shouldn’t Have Won the Nobel Prize The Nobel Prize for Literature has an august tradition of selecting authors for their political beliefs. Herta Muller roundly condemned Nazism and Fascism in her works. Orhan Pamuk thrashed Turkey so soundly over the genocide of Armenians that he was brought up for trial and ended up in exile. J.M. Coetzee excoriated South Africa for […]
Read More The Nobel Prize for Literature The Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced on Thursday, October 11th. The best roundup of likely candidates is at the Literary Saloon, as per usual. M.A. Orthofer runs down a list of contenders, offering pros, cons, and long shots. My predictions would go in the direction of the African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o or […]
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