Trevor Berrett I few years ago, over a period of just a few weeks, I read and reviewed a kind of trilogy of short biographical (albeit stylized and embellished by fiction) novellas by Jean Echenoz: Lightning (here), Running (here), and Ravel (here). These short, quirky books turn things just so, making something unique where we might expect to find something … Read more
Trevor explores Balzac’s “Facino Cane,” the first story in NYRB Classics’ new edition of The Human Comedy. Read the full post.
This week’s New Yorker fiction is Robert Coover’s modern fairy tale, “The Frog Prince.” Trevor and Betsy share their thoughts. Read the full post.
It’s time my kids got back to work and did a review. Up this time, one of our favorites, James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks (1950). The lovely hardcover New York Review Children’s Collection contains the original illustrations by Marc Simont, who died last year, and really it is just the kind of book to read … Read more
Trevor and Betsy discuss Alice Munro’s “Age of Faith,” from Lives of Girls and Women.
I missed it earlier this week, but the finalists for The Story Prize were announced (see here for the official announcement). Archangel, by Andrea Barrett Bobcat, by Rebecca Lee Tenth of December, by George Saunders My vote goes to Archangel, by Andrea Barrett. Though I should admit I have not read the entirety of any of these … Read more
The Cahiers Series is swiftly becoming my favorite place to look for small explorations. At its center, the series is set up to explore translation, but, as publisher Ornan Rotem said (here), “[translation] understood in very broad terms; that is to say, not only as the transition from one natural language to another, but also … Read more
One day the scholar/poet A.K. Ramanujan was sifting through stacks of uncatalogued books in University of Chicago’s library. He stumbled upon an anthology of around 400 classical Tamil poems that deal with love and separation, the Kuruntokai. The Kuruntokai itself is a part of a larger work, the Ettutokai, which consists of 2,371 poems by around … Read more
Today the NBCC announced their finalists. Fiction: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Someone, by Alice McDermott The Infatuations, by Javier Marías (my review here) A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt Nonfiction: Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt that Brought Him to Justice, by Kevin … Read more
Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Akhil Sharma’s “A Mistake” was originally published in the January 20, 2014 issue of The New Yorker. Betsy “A Mistake,” by Akhil Sharma, is, according to the Page-Turner interview with Deborah Treisman, the fictional account of an event that really happened to … Read more