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
Man Booker Shortlist 
I’m back! And alive and kicking. Thanks for all the kind emails. So the Man Booker Shortlist was announced. A S Byatt — “The Children’s Book” J M Coetzee — “Summertime” Adam Foulds — “The Quickening Maze” Hilary Mantel — “Wolf Hall” Simon Mawer — “The Glass Room” Sarah Waters — “The Little Stranger” And […]
Read More Surprise! So my appendix all acted up on me rather suddenly, and I’m sprawled out over various couches and beds in my apartment, recovering from some small incisions round about my bellybutton that don’t feel too small. Guess what? Morphine + Vicodin make hashwork of Marianne Wiggins and Wendell Berry. My eyes glazed over after a […]
Read More But Good Books Can Be Hard: A Reply To Lev Grossman Below: a quote-and-reply format with the Lev Grossman article in the Wall Street Journal, in which I quibble with most of his assertions. “Some of which has to do with the book business itself—sales of adult trade books declined 2.3% last year, compared with 2007. Should we still be writing difficult novels? Isn’t it time […]
Read More Plunging Standards: Why Students Don’t Even Know The Word “Canon” Okay, so the new craze sweeping the teaching profession is to let students pick their own reading material. Oi vey. As a professor, I already get enough students who have sub-par reading skills — I really don’t want to see more. I also see too many (college-educated) adult friends of mine who read virtually nothing […]
Read More Newspaper Ads Revenue Disparity Thanks to Conversational Reading for pointing me towards this article in the Columbia Journalism Review comparing the value of Online and Print readers of newspapers. Annual Worth of a Print Reader to a newspaper: $940 Annual Worth of a Online Reader to a newspaper: $46 As Ryan Chittum points out, “That means a print subscriber […]
Read More Fiction Bonanza There's a flurry of new short stories being released over at Five Chapters these next fifteen days. Instead of serializing a story over five days, there's a new short story each day, including some from collections I've been reading lately — Jennine Capo Crucet, who won the Iowa Short Fiction award this year, and Lori […]
Read More Chess Puzzles, Nabakov, and the “Splendid Insincerity” of Fiction “Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity.” – Vladimir Nabokov I’ve been playing chess seriously for more than a decade, since my graduate school days in New York City, when I first lost money to the hustlers in Washington Square […]
Read More Attention Spans for Short Stories Every time writers begin moaning about publisher's repudiation of the short story form, someone trots out a seemingly common sense argument: that our shortened attention span, created by electronic devices of all ilks, should make reader seek short stories more, not less. The argument goes that short stories can be read in one sitting, in […]
Read More Short Stories as Moles; or, the Literary Journal Scene in Germany Thanks to Absinthe Minded (great name, by the way), for referring me to this article in the Goethe Institut about the literary journal/short story scene in Germany. Love the opening: “Like moles, literary magazines burrow through the subsoil and often bring literary treasures to light. They live on self-exploitation, are sometimes short-lived and bizarre, and […]
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