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
What I’m Reading 
I’m afraid I’m on a diverse reading schedule these days. It’s never: Read One Book Then Start Another. At last count, I think I was getting through about 10 short story collections/novels. I just have one story left in both Mary Gaitskill‘s new book “Don’t Cry” and in Daniyal Mueenuddin “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.” […]
Read More AWP Roundup The Official AWP website. Hobart is blogging the event. Best American Poetry will have updates through the end of the week. Chicago Literary Scene Examiner is hot on the literary scene. A bunch of AWP pictures of authors and miscellany on Flickr. Inside Higher Ed has a post up and more to come. Barrelhouse Magazine […]
Read More Ray Bradbury Reading From New Collection In you are not in Chicago in the dead of winter enjoying AWP, and are in Los Angeles which has seen a spell of rain but also some temps in the 70s, consider checking out Ray Bradbury at the Beverly Hills Library on Friday. He’s launching a new collection of short fiction, “We’ll Always Have […]
Read More Genre Short Stories B&N Review has a piece by Paul Di Filippo on the state of short stories, specifically genre short stories. It starts: If at any given moment short fiction is not actually experiencing a Golden Age, it is always seen to be dying. Critics, authors, publishers, editors, readers — even sociologists! — engage (or should that […]
Read More Listening to Short Stories If the recession/depression has you pinching pennies, check out audible.com, the iTunes of short stories. To celebrate four weeks of short story month, Audible has lots of stories for 99 cents. But if you just want to read the stories, not listen to them, both the Fitzgerald Benjamin Button story and the Junot Diaz story […]
Read More RSS Feed I just moved the RSS feed for BookFox from Feedburner to Google. The transition should be seamless, but if you have problems, let me know — johnmattfox AT hotmail DOT com If you don’t follow BookFox via RSS, please join by clicking the button in the upper left hand column, or, if you prefer, insert […]
Read More NEA Funding in Peril I heard on NPR yesterday that one of the sticking points in the stimulus package is funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). $50 million of the $819 billion (.06 %) is slated for the organization. Here’s the debate: Jack Kingston, a Republican Representative from Georgia, advocated shifting the proposed NEA funding into […]
Read More Roundup: 52 Stories Some postmodern fun: a novel told entirely in the second person. I’m hearing echoes of “Upon a Winter’s Night a Traveler…” I like what Harper Perennial is doing with their fifty-two stories site that publishes a new short story weekly — it’s all a build-up to the summer, when they’re releasing six new short story […]
Read More Daniyal Mueenuddin Links Daniyal Mueenuddin just made a pit-stop here in L.A. to promote his collection “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” which has been making waves. I couldn’t go to the reading at Vromans because I had to teach a night class of creative nonfiction, but I’m going to catch up with him soon. So until then, I […]
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