Trevor Berrett I have to admit that I didn’t know Leigh Brackett was a renowned science fiction author. I only knew her through her screenwriting credits. In 1946 she worked with William Faulkner on Howard Hawks’ film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. In 1959, she worked with Hawks again on his 1959 film Rio Bravo, one of my favorites. She returned to Raymond Chandler in … Read more
Dan Rhodes’ Marry Me (2013), just out in the U.S. from Europa Editions, is a collection of around 80 short — very short — stories focused on, says Michael Dirda in his exciting review for The Washington Post (here), love, marriage, infidelity, divorce, and death. Perfect for Valentine’s Day, right? I actually do not have this … Read more
Trevor and Betsy discuss Alice Munro’s “Baptizing,” from Lives of Girls and Women.
Trevor reviews Luis Buñuel’s short film on faith and hypocrisy, Simon of the Desert. Read the full post.
Later this month, The Library of America will publish the first two of what will be three volumes of Bernard Malamud’s work: Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1940s & 50s and Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1960s. Before these volumes arrived, I’d read only The Fixer (included in the second volume), and that was five years ago … Read more
Today the inaugural Folio Prize shortlist was announced, and it’s filled with some interesting stuff: Red Doc>, by Anne Carson Schroder, by Amity Gaige Last Friends, by Jane Gardam Benediction, by Kent Haruf The Flame Throwers, by Rachel Kushner A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, by Eimer McBride A Naked Singularity, by Sergio De La … Read more
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “Come Together” (tr. from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett) was originally published in the February 17 & 24, 2014 issue of The New Yorker. Trevor Since this is merely an excerpt … Read more
Rebecca Lee’s “Bobcat” is the first story in her short story collection Bobcat (2013), which is a finalist for this year’s The Story Prize. “Bobcat” was originally published as a chapbook with Madras Press in 2010. This story and I started off on the wrong foot. It begins with the narrator preparing a meal with her … Read more
Alejandro Zambra has been making a splash in English reading circles over the past few years with translations of his short books Bonsai and The Private Lives of Trees. In 2010 he was one of the twenty-two writers featured in Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists. It was there that I first read him and in … Read more
Trevor and Betsy discuss Alice Munro’s “Baptizing,” from Lives of Girls and Women.