Monthly Archives: May 2012
John Cheever would have been 100 today
John Cheever would have been 100 years old today, raising the disquieting prospect that the world he described may be transforming into history. Thinking about the real and the created: In his forthcoming How Literature Saved My Life, David Shields writes Driving around, I heard a Cheever story on the radio and found it so […]
Up Today: Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading
We love this idea! Starting today the innovative folks over at Electric Literature bring you Recommended Reading, a weekly dose of meaty writing chosen for you by notable authors and editors. This week: “Watching Mysteries With My Mother,” a story by Ben Marcus; next week, a new translation of Clarice Lispecter, chosen by New Directions. […]
A Little Chess Table, new from Jerzy Pilch
It was a sweltering August in the year 1962. I was ten years old, and I was at the apogee of all possibilities. After some dozen months of incessant soccer playing, I had become a consummate forward. In a thick journal with a green binding, which I had received for my birthday, I was writing […]
A Self-portrait, by Karl O. Knausgaard
There is, in London, a painting that moves me as much every time I go and see it. It is a self-portrait painted by the late Rembrandt. His later paintings are usually characterized by an extreme coarseness of stroke, rendering everything subordinate to the expression of the moment, at once shining and sacred, and still […]