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
Poetry on Friday 
Hi. I’m the second blogger that BookFox has asked to fill-in while he is traveling this summer. And I’m a poet. At my site, Radical Nonsense, a reader will not find much of my own poetry, but however they will find my thoughts on just about anything literary, tea or any intellectual pursuit. While I […]
Read More Dispatch from our Foreign Correspondent Greetings from Chile, where I recently visited the house of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. I figured since I was here I might as well visit whatever literary attractions there are in Chile, and Neruda is the main draw. (I´ve been reading Roberto Bolano as well, but I´ll post on that later.) I was introduced […]
Read More Intro Numero Uno (Road Trip Lit) Hello. I’m Will Entrekin. Pleased to see ya, as it were. My esteemed colleague and hopefully classmate-soon-to-be, the illustrious Mister Fox, asked me a little bit ago if I would contribute to his blog while he is in warmer climes. Though, technically, John and I are both in and around Los Angeles at this point, […]
Read More Interview at Emerging Writers Network Okay, last post before I get out of the country, seriously. Over at Emerging Writers Network, Dan has a roundtable with numerous bloggers, and I am one of the interviewees. Always interesting to hear what your fellow bloggers say about their site, and also nice to see such attention being paid to the emerging blogger […]
Read More Summer Posting Hello loyal BookFox readers, I’m taking off to South America with Mrs. BookFox for six weeks, until August 9th. Going to visit Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Why? Because neither of us has been there, no other reason. The vacation time is the blessed union of when a teacher marries another teacher. Since I’ll be […]
Read More More Rushdie The latest development in the furor over Salman Rushdie’s knighting is that the Pakistani clerics awarded Osama Bin Laden a title as well: A group of hardline Pakistani Muslim clerics said on Thursday they had bestowed a religious title on Osama bin Laden in response to a British knighthood for author Salman Rushdie. The Pakistan […]
Read More Congrats! Congratulations to Peter Orner for winning the VCU First Novelist Award for The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo.
Read More Salman Rushdie’s Knighthood From the San Francisco Gate comes a brief article offering a quote from Pakistan’s religious affairs minister: “If someone exploded a bomb on [Salman Rushdie’s] body, he would be right to do so unless the British government apologizes and withdraws the ‘sir’ title.” The International Herald Tribune reports that the protests and burning of effigies […]
Read More Roundup of Essays Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has a lovely essay at The Washington Post that’s supposedly about the desks she learned to write upon, but it’s really more about the love of the house where she grew up. Thought the whole fatwa on Salman Rushdie had slipped into the dustbin of history? Not quite. Rushdie was knighted and […]
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