Autumn leaves
From Guy de Maupassant’s Alien Hearts.
Meta detective
From Leonardo Sciascia’s Equal Danger.
“The padlock knocks”
This image of an empty house being done in by the weather makes me wonder if “Time Passes,” the middle section of To the Lighthouse, owes something Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven.
“Unflavored dulness”
“It is wonderful, the romance and tragedy and adventure which one may find in a quiet old- fashioned country town, though to heartily enjoy the every-day life one must care to study life and character, and must find pleasure in thought and observation of simple things, and have an instinctive, delicious interest in what to other eyes”: Sarah Orne Jewett. is unflavored dulness.
Smells
From Daniel Pinkwater’s The Education of Robert Nifkin.
Orange Crate Art: Newspapers and novels
Walter Benjamin: “One may, if necessary, read the newspaper while eating. But never a novel. These are two conflicting obligations.”
Keats or Shelley
From Maureen Duffy’s That’s How it Was.
Growing
From Maureen Duffy’s novel That’s How it Was.
“Oh all the things kids do”
From Maureen Duffy’s That’s How it Was.
Alice Munro (1931-2024)
“My stories have gotten around quite remarkably for short stories,” she told the interviewer. “I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art, not something you play around with until you got a novel written.”
“The ’Clipse” redux
You don’t have to be in the path of totality to enjoy “The ’Clipse.” It’s a piece of Timmy and Lassie fiction that I wrote in 2017, after the last solar eclipse that passed through Illinois. “The ’Clipse” is both tongue-in-cheek and genuinely reverential, if that’s possible. I think it is.
Jim has spoken before
Predating Percival Everett’s novel James, an unusual piece of literary criticism in the form of a letter from John Isaac Hawkins, Jim's son, to “Mister Finn,” in which John recounts his father’s commentary on Huck’s tale.
“My terrible predicament”
Dr. O’Connor (an unlicensed gynecologist) is the novel’s great talker, a man who knows he should have been born a woman (we would call him trans), a teller of his own troubles, a confessor to his friends, a philosopher of the night. This recounted reconciliation of father and son is the only moment of human reconciliation in Nightwood.
“Tortoiseshell cats and champagne”
A passage from Katherine Mansfield.
Steven Millhauser’s Disruptions
Having read all of Steven Millhauser’s published fiction, I sometimes torment myself by trying to decide which of his books to recommend as a way into his work, recognizing that to begin with one would be to miss — at least for a time — the delights of all the others. If a reader were to begin reading Millhauser with a book other than Disruptions, his new collection of eighteen stories, here is some of what that reader would miss
“And again meanings interlock”
From Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies.
Computers and butterflies
From Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies.
Travel by plane and book
A passage from Italo Calvino captures what flying always feels like to me: it’s not being anywhere.
“A fairly precise notion of the book”
Calvino anticipates what’s now called “distant reading.”
Novels and theories
From Italo Calvino: reading for what you already know.
The formula
Italo Calvino anticipated the AI-generated books at Amazon.
A January day
From Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children.
Turgenev understood the flow state
Compare Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
“O Heaven, were my whiskers neglected!”
Murr in love.
Reading and writing in the dark
From E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr.
“My little right paw”
From E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr.
“Scholarly voracity”
From E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr.
Martins and Child
Seeing as our household has had Julia Child on the brain, I reread a piece of fan-fiction I wrote a few years ago: “Bon Appétit!” It’s about Julia Child visiting the Martins — as in Paul, Ruth, Timmy, and Lassie. Oh, and Uncle Petrie.
“That bright August morning”
From Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse.
A source for Columbo
It’s Porfiry Petrovich, from Crime and Punishment.