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Less Chance Than Choice
My custom when deciding what to read next is to follow fiction with non-fiction. That way, characters stay where they’re supposed to. If I read two novels back-to-back, Beckett’s Celia from Murphy is...
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Bloom on Castorp
Harold Bloom writing of one of my favourite novels Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: When I was a boy, first reading fiercely, some sixty years ago, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain was widely received as...
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>Mostly Bellow, Some Roth
>Saul Bellow disappeared off the edge of my literary radar. Perhaps he caught the tailwind of my growing disenchantment with the novels of Philip Roth. Gabriel Josipovici’s brilliant essay on Saul...
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Completed The Long Life by Helen Small
Youth and Old Age - Antonio Ciccone (1960) Plato thought 50 an appropriate age to begin the study of philosophy. The Long Life is Helen Small’s pre-emptive (she admits to 42 at the time of writing her...
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Saul Bellow’s Hunger for the Universal
At Bellow’s memorial meeting, held in the Young Men’s Hebrew Association at Lexington Avenue and 92nd Street, two years ago, the main speakers were Ian McEwan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Martin Amis, William...
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Brian Dillon’s “I Am Sitting in a Room”
Brian Dillon’s I Am Sitting in a Room is the first in Cabinet’s 24-Hour Book series. Dillon’s book explores the scenography and architecture of writing itself. Inspired in part by Georges Perec’s...
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Katie Roiphe’s In Praise of Messy Lives
That Gawker regularly vent their unsophisticated spleen on Katie Roiphe may be thought a reason to read her books. Much of the other invective that streams towards Roiphe appears to be a result of her...
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My Reading Years
My insatiable appetite for reading was borne from scarcity. Growing up in the Far East, the local bookshop thrived off the sale of potboilers: Arthur Hailey, Wilbur Smith, Ed McBain. Thirty years ago,...
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Salter: Precious and Exotic
James Salter’s Light Years juxtaposes several infinitely malleable themes. The oldest, in the tradition of Madame Bovary, dissects the flawed diamond that is the institution of marriage, and examines...
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