Monthly Archives: March 2013
Margaret Weatherford
At home, we are a normal family: my parents, my brother, and me. We don’t live in Los Angeles, actually, but in Norwalk, next to the freeway. We live in one of those houses you see as you speed by or sit still in traffic, suffocating. A cracked cement patio, baby clothes stuck to dry […]
James Kelman coming to New York!
Little Star loves James Kelman. To our eye he is one of the most lyrical, subtle, inventive craftsmen of prose today. His new book, Mo Said She Was Quirky, which inhabits the mind of a woman croupier for a single inverted day, is a miracle of sympathetic intelligence. He is making a rare visit […]
Bartleby Unveiled, by Prudence Crowther
Bartleby laid down his pen with finality. Did he mean to finish, I asked? He would “prefer not to.” And though I promised he needn’t meet his daily quota of 7,200 words but could stick to drawing up simple eviction notices, that month he wrote no more. Desperate to recharge the clerk’s former industry, I […]
Two American Landscapes: Lydia Davis, Eliot Weinberger
No Meeting Lydia Davis The hour of nine passes; then ten, and half past, and there is no sound of the church bell. Not only is there no bell on the old meeting house, but there is also no meeting there, for the aged pastor Underwood has retired, the venerable figure I barely remember. And […]
Sewing and dreams: “Mr. Ferri and the Furrier,” by Cynthia Zarin
In the jewelry store I unwrapped the fabric. I had bought it the week before, in the pouring rain, in the garment district, in a shop I had visited obsessively years before. It was during a time in my life when the amount of time that I devoted to thinking about upholstery fabric was in […]