The little white attic

1/ As I consider buying a Muriel Spark omnibus, I’m idly thinking about the books I own. We all know reading and book buying are two differe...

I quit on Jane and Prudence after about 50 pages.  Some of you will probably say I’m missing the point, but Barbara Pym writes about the tr...

There was a time when pretty much all I read was novels and short stories; the plays I knew were those assigned at school or university. The...

Nabokov says in Strong Opinions :  “The word “genius” is passed around rather generously, isn’t it? At least in English, because its Russian...

When people talk about Chekhov, they usually talk about him as a subtle writer, depicting with sensitivity and compassion ordinary people’s ...

As a little break from Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels , I’ve been reading Chekhov (who can be a better companion when one’s got the morbs?).  ...

April is to me full of sad associations.  Last year, I was going through a difficult time. So I went through one Chekhov volume after anothe...

Aren’t you amazed at the range of characters in Shakespeare? I mean not just a range in backgrounds, identities, personalities, viewpoints, ...

1/ The greatest novel I’ve read this year is easily The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. Sometimes I look at the suffering around the wor...

I prefer Chekhov’s later and longer stories, naturally. But many of his earlier stories, though just sketches, are very good. In Volume 8 of...

Not enough is said about the great value of Constance Garnett’s 13 volumes of Chekhov. I like her prose, I also like the way she organises t...

1/ It’s strange how these things work. There are writers with whom it was love at first sight (Tolstoy, Melville). There are writers I came ...

There is often something violent in the works of Flannery O’Connor. In A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories , the weakest stories ar...

In Lectures on Russian Literature , Nabokov writes:  “Russian critics have noted that Chekhov's style, his choice of words and so on, di...

Tolstoy, as you know, is the novelist I love and admire the most. One of the reasons is the vast range of characters, vast range of human ex...

Lately, I have been reading and enjoying Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty (about Russian literature and history). But I’ve put...

1/ This is the first Chekhov play I’ve read, and it’s harder to read than Shakespeare or Ibsen—there are too many characters to keep track o...

When I first read Chekhov, I was too young—I hadn’t lived. My rediscovery of Chekhov was two years ago, and now that I have loved and lost, ...

I’m going through one of the worst times—perhaps the hardest—of my life. Heartbreak. So I turned to Chekhov. At a time of heartache and deje...