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
Roundup YouTube 
The first YouTube literary journal. And probably not the last. The disadvantages (of which the article lists few) and the advantages of authors branding themselves. If your sorrow for John Updike’s passing has not abated yet, you could always buy a T-shirt with his face on it from Flatmancrooked, a site which besides selling Updike-themed […]
Read More The Last Updike Book R.I.P. John Updike. You will be missed. Already a vast number of voices are singing your praises in eulogies. You are the symbol of an era in American writing. But at least you leave us with one last collection of short stories that will come out after you’ve gone: My Father’s Tears and Other Stories
Read More Oldest is a Matter of Pride In the spirit of Harper’s Readings, I offer this trivia about literary journals. Below are the journals that use the adjective “oldest” as a badge of pride. And no — despite readers’ assumptions that only one journal would use the term “oldest,” with others using only “older” or “not as young as most,” quite a […]
Read More Roundup! With Obama The Guardian on Barack Obama’s skill with narrative, as well as his fascination with Marilynn Robison’s Gilead. Not content with listing the top ten or a hundred books, The Guardian lists their top 1,000,000 books (okay, top 1,000 — but still, I feel bludgeoned). Lev Grossman in Time Magazine weighs in on the state of […]
Read More Jim Shepard at the Hammer Museum Jim Shepard is a funny, funny man. He kept us all in stitches, even as he bemoaned the lack of importance of short stories in popular culture and the way that Europeans value writers much more than Americans do. He read from his new, as-yet-unpublished story “Minotaur,” about the black world in the military (no, […]
Read More Journals Accepting Electronic Submissionss For all my readers who are writers, click on the link to the left under Pages: Journals Accepting Electronic Submissions. I found there wasn’t a good list up anywhere, and decided to make my own. It’s a list which will change fairly frequently, but I’ll try to keep it updated.
Read More Top 100 Journals Accepting Online Submissions As of July 2019, 80 of the top 100 journals accept online submissions. Of those 80, 43 charge reading fees. I would strongly advise you to submit first to the journals without submission fees, submit reluctantly to those that charge fees, and never submit to anyone that charges more than $3 (unless it’s a contest […]
Read More Jim Shepard at the Hammer For all of you in Los Angeles, Jim Shepard will be at the Hammer Museum this Tuesday night, and so will I. Except he will be on the stage, reading and talking to Mona Simpson, while I will be sitting in the audience, dutifully listening to this short story master.
Read More Ali Smith On Short Stories The first story in Ali Smith’s collection The First Person is half meditation on the form and half character struggling with her friend’s cancer. I won’t reproduce any of the cancer storyline, but the first two quotes below are said by characters when trying to describe the short story: “The novel, he was saying, was […]
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