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
Nobel Prize for Literature Speculation 
Okay, last minute speculation here before the big announcement tomorrow. The Guardian notes that the Swedes have given a tip-off by critiquing their European focus in the last decade: Peter Englund [the new frontman of the Nobel literature prize jury] has said that he believes the prize has been too “Eurocentric” in recent years (nine […]
Read More The Case for Books by Robert Darnton When arguing for the importance and relevance of physical books in “The Case for Books,” Robert Darnton mentions smell as a factor: “Books also give off special smells. According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books—so important that they resist […]
Read More Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes First: Who decided to give a melancholy book called “Nocturnes” a bright white cover? Check out the British cover — much more evocative. But aside from quibbles over cover art, I enjoyed Ishiguro’s latest very much. Slow, stately prose reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri, and highly readable. Also, “Nocturnes” holds together remarkably well. In fact, almost […]
Read More 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature Predictions Thank God for bookies. While literary prognosticators give us wet dreams of lit crushes, bookies give us good old numeric odds, backed up by hard cash. Not that they usually know what they're doing (see: last year. J.M.G. Le Clezio, 14 to 1 odds — and when Harold Pinter won, he wasn't even in the […]
Read More TriQuarterly Shuts Down Okay, so let's get the order of events correct. First, Cliff at Perpetual Folly tipped me off to Evanston Now, a local online news source in the Northwestern area (where TriQuarterly is published). Evanston Now reported that the Northwestern University Press, which publishes TriQuarterly, would be scaling back a number of its operations. Mentioned in […]
Read More Best of National Book Award So the National Book Award is taking a page from the Man Booker Prize by deciding to do a “Best of the National Book Award.” It’s not much more than a stunt to draw attention to the prize, and of course the winner takes nothing but popular acclaim, but who are we to complain? Contests […]
Read More Oprah Book Club Picks Uwem Akpan Is Oprah’s selection of Uwem’s Akpan’s “Say You’re One of Them” surprising? Yes, but maybe it shouldn’t be. Oprah’s picked books with cannibalism of children, incest, autistic-child love stories, hermaphrodites, and pretty much any other theme or style or length you could imagine. So the fact that she’s finally selected a short story collection (yes!), […]
Read More Irvine Welsh “Reheated Cabbage” Review Go to The Rumpus and check out my review of Irvine Welsh’s “Reheated Cabbage.” It’s a short story collection in high Trainspotting form — drugs, lowlife characters, and humor. PS. The rat on the dust jacket is likely a metaphorical depiction of one or several characters. Here’s the opening: The unappetizing title of Reheated Cabbage, […]
Read More Dan Brown The Lost Symbol Reviews I’m a bit surprised at the book reviews of Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” — everybody’s handling it with kid gloves. Towards the end of say, the LA Times and NY Times reviews, there’s a few lines of condescension, but as though they had been slipped in. The B&N Review by Sarah Weinman spends most […]
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