Natalia Ginzburg: The Road to the City
Natalia Ginzburg’s first novel, The Road to the City (1942, tr: Francis Frenaye, 1952) is a coming-of-age of story, cool in its delivery, and hard in its truth. The opening…
Annie Dillard: The Writing Life
Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life (1989) is less an instruction manual for would-be writers and more a reality check. “Why people want to be writers I will never know”, she…
Jon Fosse: A Shining
I was reading a book. It was good. It felt good to be reading. I didn’t know where the story was going. I was just reading. Curiosity had taken hold…
Ricardo Romero: The President’s Room
In an unnamed country, after an ambiguous event, there’s an anonymous narrator living in a nondescript house in an undisclosed neighbourhood. After whatever happened in the past houses no longer…
Edogawa Rampo: Beast in the Shadows
The narrator of Edogawa Rampo’s Beast in the Shadows (1928, tr: Ian Hughes, 2006) suggests there are two categories of detective novelist. While he views himself as the type interested…
Agatha Christie: The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Since his appearance over a hundred years ago, Hercule Poirot has become part of the cultural landscape. Agatha Christie wrote thirty-three novels featuring him, as well as several plays and…
Lora Senf: The Clackity
Blight Harbor is the “seventh most haunted town in America (per capita)” and is a place where the paranormal is just normal. You’re as likely to know the name of…
Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto
On its first publication, The Castle of Otranto (1764) was attributed to a translation by William Marshall from the Italian of Onuphrio Muralto. Supposedly found “in the library of an…
Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Fowzia Karimi: Small Pieces
To see the meeting in print of Micheline Aharonian Marcom and Fowzia Karimi feels like destiny fulfilling itself. True, Karimi has previously illustrated Marcom’s The Brick House (2017), but in…
Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow: All the Little Bird Hearts
Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s All the Little Bird-Hearts (2023) follows an account of one memorable summer that irreparably changed its narrator’s life, Sunday, is an autistic woman with notable quirks: she enjoys…