The little white attic

Virgin Soil is one of Turgenev’s lesser-known works. Not hard to see why. It is, as Tom of Wuthering Expectations has put it, formless.   B...

Virgin Soil seems like the right book to read after Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty .  Perhaps at some point I will write abou...

Curious, aren’t you? I generally avoid blogging about things I hate, but today let’s stir shit up. Note that I will only name films which ar...

One film per director.  Persona (dir. Ingmar Bergman)   Sunset Boulevard (dir. Billy Wilder)  Ran (dir. Akira Kurosawa)  Casablanca (dir....

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...

From January 2023 to July 2023 In bold: films and plays I think are good  1/ 海街 diary (Our Little Sister - Japan - 2015)  2/ 女が階段を上る時 (When ...

Let other pens dwell on plot, I’d like to focus on the writing—for now.  Flannery O’Connor is very different from Alice Munro. Intense. Bang...

As a short story writer, Alice Munro is in the line of Chekhov. I like that she has great control and writes enough, suggesting much more un...