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
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.
Read More The Evolution of Author Videos Seth Greenland writes a piece for the LA Times that categorizes the types of author videos — the author-talking-to-camera, a graphic montage that expresses the sense of the book, or an author hanging out in the book’s locations. His own video, promoting “Shining City,” falls into the last category, and it’s hilarious, complete with faux […]
Read More A Hunger Artist: Indra Sinha Begins Fasting Last year, one of the most interesting nominations for the Booker was a book called “Animal’s People”, written by Indra Sinha, about a boy walking on all fours because of the Bhopal chemical incident. Well, now Indra Sinha is standing behind the work he did on the novel by joining eight other people on a […]
Read More A History of Submissions If you want a glance at the trenches of the lit life, check out Lily Hamrick’s ongoing saga of submitting to lit journals, Dispatches from the Query Wars.
Read More Search Engine MailBag #1 This heralds the beginning of a new feature here on BookFox, one in which I field search engine queries that have come to my site. (For those of you who don’t know, yes, I can see what people typed into Google in order to find my site). Most of the searches are directed correctly to […]
Read More Roundup: Lit Mags, Quarterlies, and “Home” Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy points us toward this video of Mary Gaitskill on “Front Porch,” which is a rising star among the online-only lit journals. I’ve been reading a new quarterly from Britain called The Drawbridge. Each issue is themed (Memory, Risk, Rumour) and sports such luminaries as Terry Eagleton, J.G. Ballard, and Etgar […]
Read More Fiction Issue Cagematch: The New Yorker VS Atlantic Monthly So I’ve been reading The New Yorker summer fiction edition and also checking out the authors slated for publication in the Atlantic fiction issue, and am struck by the differences. The New Yorker has an all-star line-up of writers, of which I recognized every one: Vladimir Nabokov, Annie Proulx, Mary Gaitskill. Then also some nonfiction […]
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