September’s Best Reviewed Fiction ‹ Literary Hub
Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and Samanta Schweblin’s Good and Evil all feature among the best reviewed books of the months. * 1.…| Literary Hub
While translating Dibelius’s book on John the Baptist (Die urchristliche Überlieferung von Johannes dem Täufer, 1911), I have been contemplating his discussions concerning methods of literary criticism. In particular, how do we identify bits of tradition from the later narrative framework in which they were placed? The collectors’ additions are often clearly distinguishable from collected … Continue reading "Like Croutons in the Soup? — Wellhausen on the Acts of the Apostles" The po...| Vridar
When we first encounter Lyra Silvertongue, neé Belacqua, she is hidden in a wardrobe and listening intently to her uncle, Lord Asriel, give a presentation to Oxford scholars on his findings about Dust. Though she is only eleven years old,| Literary Hub
Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, and Samanta Schweblin’s Good and Evil all feature among the best reviewed books of the months. * 1.…| Literary Hub
Remembering the poet, fiction-writer, and ethnographer Temsula Ao (1945-2022).| Frontline
“In times of uncertainty, what we can imagine ahead of us matters.” I write on Kaliane Bradley’s wonderful novel The Ministry of Time for the British Science Fiction Association&#…| matt finch / mechanical dolphin
Oh, to read A Child’s Christmas in Wales over the holidays during a pandemic, with three of our four parents deceased, my 91-year-old mother-in-law in lockdown in her retirement village six hours away, and time on our hands to reminisce about our childhood Christmases, when our families were healthy and intact, and all was right with the world. How many such thoughts, such essays, has Dylan Thomas’s tender story prompted over the years? Does that make my thoughts, my essay a cliché? Mayb...| Legacy Book Press LLC
Humidity be damned, this month’s crop of books is sparking with exciting new premises and relationship dynamics. You’ve got robots-turned-cooks, an economy built entirely on mandatory memory collec…| Literary Hub
It’s funny to look back, ten years on, and realise I’m still just doing the stuff I was trained to do at university. It’s essentially just close reading – I like to pick up a game and look at one facet or another. It’s not a strict rule, but it’s pretty clearly my bread and […]| Death is a Whale
In Gav Thorpe’s The First Wall, there’s an ongoing debate about whether religion is bad for you. On one side is Euphrati Keeler, incipient mystic and star of the rising cult of the God-…| Death is a Whale
"The Spiral Staircase" is of a different order, truly a lapidary masterpiece. Even as I began it, the story sent me off on associative journeys--Borges "Library of Babel," Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle. And then the story brought me back to its own intention, which I believe to be an intensely lyrical exploration of presence and absence, in this case not only psychological but also metaphysical. Marvelous.| A Writing Life: Lâle Davidson
My writing has been disrupted these past few months. I like to be very regular – one essay on religion, one on video games, alternating weeks. I’ve been doing that since 2022. But this …| Death is a Whale
Not rethinking realism, as in rethinking philosophy’s single, objective reality, hard as rocks and nails. No, I mean rethinking realism in the sense of questioning the elevation of literary realism over the many other forms of fiction. Realism has long been the go-to form in literature for telling a story a certain way. An entire […]| Jim Nelson
“All Things Are Too Small” declares the title, borrowed from a 13th-century Dutch mystic, of the new collection of essays by Becca Rothfeld, one of the most prolific and versatile critics working today. The claim initially confused me. Too small? Casting a weary glance at the way we live now — visual excess blaring from […] The post Reimagining Excess first appeared on The Smart Set.| The Smart Set
