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: I’m Back! 
Apologies for the scarcity of posts this week. I was up in Canada for a few days. But without any further ado, a roundup of stuff that has happened in my absence. A new Open Letters for the month of October. Oxford University Press is publishing “As They Say in Zanzibar: Proverbial Wisdom from Around […]
Read More Recent Journalism Pop over to PBS’s Channel Thirteen website for my recommendations on the new high school reading canon. Feel free to critique my list or offer a book you wish you were assigned in high school. UPDATE: The link to PBS is dead. I’ve reposted the article below. The New Canon John Matthew Fox Selecting reading […]
Read More Roundup with Silverblatt I’ve been listening to Michael Silverblatt’s interviews with David Foster Wallace for Bookworm, and they are quite rewarding. I especially like that Silverblatt starts out the interview on “Infinite Jest” by asking Wallace straight out whether the structure of the book is based on fractals. (!?) The National Book Foundation highlights five very talented writers […]
Read More The Patronage of Writers The university has taken over the role of Patron of the Arts, especially for creative writing, as the New York Times points out in Those Who Write, Teach. Five years ago I gave up the full-time writing life and became the kind of domesticated writer known as a professor. I was not shot with a […]
Read More Roundup: Are Books Dead? The Bollywood of Lit Mags. Books are Dead (or so they’d like you to think). Edward Champion has catalogued responses from a number of authors on David Foster Wallace’s death. Bilingual short story collection — Spanish and English stories, side by side. Salman Rushdie, editor of this year’s Best American Short Stories, answers two questions […]
Read More David Foster Wallace Suicide I first got the news that David Foster Wallace was dead from a Laila Lalami post on Facebook, and perhaps because it was on Facebook, I instantly went into denial and thought it had to be some kind of sick joke. But it’s not. His wife came home last night to find the 46-year-old Wallace […]
Read More To Remember the Day I was there in New York on 9/11, on the 21st story of an apartment building in East Village. Watched them both fall. Looking back at all my writing about the event, I tried so many metaphors to describe the day. People covered in chalky dust like mimes. People streaming over the Brooklyn bridge like […]
Read More The Interactive Epistolary Word on the literary street is that Ben Greenman — whose website, oddly enough, resembles a bank’s — is coming out with a new short story collection in October. Correspondences is aptly named: the book includes postcards for reader response and interaction. It’s also a limited edition letterpress, with three accordion books (which starts to […]
Read More Judging Literary Prizes Over at the Guardian, there’s a judge from every year since 1969 to talk about the experience of judging the Booker. Here’s the dust-up: No one ever, ever, changes their mind about a book. Even after all the discussion between judges, everyone still hates the novels they hated and loved the novels they loved. As […]
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