One of my favorite lines from one of Anthony Burgess’s greatest (and underappreciated) novels. “Mrs. Killigrew, whose husband played bridge all the time, discovered a passion for a man whose face was covered with warts. Why was this? In a story you had to find a reason, but real life gets on very well without… Continue reading Book Notes
It’s hard not to envy the experience and the deep reading of philosophy and literature which writer-farmer Rebecca Bratten Weiss brings to bear in the marvelous poems she’s been composing for almost a decade. A former adjunct professor of literature, Rebecca is the digital editor of U.S. Catholic (for whom I’ve written). Her articles and… Continue reading Rebecca Bratten Weiss and The Gods We Have Eaten
With thanks to the inimitable James Wood in the New Yorker. The books overlap enough to disclose a composite type: an outsider, a youngish Englishwoman of ambiguous ethnicity (“But you are English—or aren’t you?” Marya is asked), curiously unidentifiable by the traditional English markers of accent and education (“She was born in the West Indies… Continue reading The Discovery of Jean Rhys
If you’v never read anything by Shirley Hazzard, you need to. I’m hooked, after reading an appreciation of her stories in Commonweal a couple of months back…
