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

  • Etgar Keret On The Silver Screen image of tag icon

    The movie is called “$9.99.” No, that’s not the price for streaming it, or some price cross-over from the e-book world. And it’s based on Etgar Keret’s short stories. And it’s stop-motion animation. Fun, fun, fun. It’ll actually sell for $24.98 when it comes out on February 23rd. Here’s the trailer:

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  • Spoiled Salinger image of tag icon

    Bookslut pointed me toward the Economist blog “More Intelligent Life,” where in a post titled “Salinger’s Spoiled Children” Bradley Freedman describes a friend’s pilgrimage to see JD Salinger and present him with a manifesto demanding more fiction. Freedman, as you can infer from the title of this post, disagrees with his friend’s impulse: But instead of […]

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  • Requiem for Equator Books image of tag icon

    Equator Books is shutting their doors after nearly six years here in Los Angeles. The knowledge that independent bookstores seem to be shutting down with metronomic frequency does not reduce the sorrow of the occasion. Since Equator specialized in collectible books, it was a virtual shrine to the book-as-object. I remember browsing through in awe […]

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  • Amazon’s Strongarming of Macmillan Day 8 image of tag icon

    The Guardian has an excellent article rounding up all the sites, authors, and publishing groups boycotting Amazon in one form or another. Some remove all links to Amazon; others encourage readers to buy books from elsewhere. It's this last tactic, encouraged by John Scalzi, which I think will be the most helpful. Instead of limiting […]

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  • Amazon’s Extortion of Macmillan Day 6 image of tag icon

    It’s 10:00 p.m. here in Los Angeles, on the sixth day of the Amazonian extortion against Macmillan. Counting the days is starting to seem like some kind of foreign hostage crisis where the newscasters count out the length of imprisonment. As many people have pointed out, Amazon doesn’t have the slightest clue of the definition […]

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  • Ted Genoways Screed in Mother Jones image of tag icon

    Ted Genoways, editor of VQR, wrote an impassioned call for action in Mother Jones. Essentially, he laments the decline of the literary journal and the explosion of creative writing programs and writers who don't read. About those writers who don't read: "Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this […]

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  • Book Piracy image of tag icon

    Over at The Millions, there's some great journalism going on — an interview with a book pirate called "The Real Caterpillar." One of the most interesting sections is at the end: Perhaps if readers were more confident that the majority of the money went to the author, people would feel more guilty about depriving the […]

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  • The Story Prize Finalists image of tag icon

    Three books have been nominated by The Story Prize: In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin Drift by Victoria Patterson Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower Well, I guessed the winner last year, so I’ll take another stab for 2010. It seems the two frontrunners would be Mueenuddin and Tower, both of whom […]

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  • The Predictive Power of Book Reviews image of tag icon

    I’ve become disenchanted with book reviews. At one point in my life, I think I relied upon them more. Maybe I trusted the taste and judgment of the seasoned reviewers. Now, I feel a bad review has no predictive power as to whether or not I’ll like a book. A good review actually has more […]

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