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
Literary Quiz 
So I am playing Trivial Pursuit on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala and find this question: What organ did 500 Iranians offer to sell in order to finance the fatwa against Salman Rushdie? Okay, so you probably got it: their kidneys. But I just found the whole organ-selling angle to be a unique way to fund […]
Read More The Disappeared: Fiction VS Nonfiction Education I visited an art show in Antigua yesterday. It was called “Los Deseparecidos” or “The Disappeared.” Each of the installations focused on a particular heinous act in South or Central America. The disappearances in Argentina, the massacres in Columbia, Pinochet in Chile, the dictatorship in Uruguay, martial law in Venezuala. A video showed two men […]
Read More Hello From Guatemala Hello All, I am currently on a three week trip to Guatemala and thus this post will not have apostrophes or dashes because foreign keyboards have all the symbols mixed up. But posts will continue, from myself and select colleagues, so continue to check back in. As far as my reading adventures down here, I […]
Read More Search Engine Mailbox #2 The search engine came in with some doozies this week. In regards to the misdirected ones, I will rescue these poor orphan searches by providing them loving answers. Search: What happened to Swink Magazine? Answer: Good question. Swink was part of a boom in LA literary journals back in 2004, but now has been declared […]
Read More DIY Literary Scene: How to Build a Literary Gathering Ever since the post on the Millions last week about DIY literary scenes, I've been considering what makes for a good hip indie literary gathering. Also, I've been thinking about why the indie concert is often so different than a reading and how that distance can be abridged. Let me first share about a literary […]
Read More Short Story Collections on EW’s Radar Entertainment Weekly lists the top 100 books published between 1983 and 2008. It’s idiosyncratic (as any list of this type must be), waffling between pop culture and high-brow, but at least it manages a couple of short story collections: Selected Stories, Alice Munro Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat Pastoralia, George Saunders […]
Read More Punctuation and Sentences Conversational Reading has an excellent post exploring the nuances of punctuation and the structure of sentences. To add to the comments on the power of commas to speed up the pace, I would add that Jose Saramago is particularly effective in this technique. Also, I can’t help but recall I once lost an adjunct job […]
Read More Being Chummy with Failure The American Scholar offers an article by William Deresiewicz on the Disadvantages of an Elite Education. I particularly liked this excerpt, which describes the patience one must have with poetry: This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, […]
Read More Million Writers Award: Top Online Stories storySouth has announced its shortlist of online short stories for the Million Writers Award. It’s a very egalitarian selection, with no journal represented twice, and you can read all the stories to vote for your favorite.
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