"Sometimes my voice broke on a high note but I sang on, for those songs said better than I could the emptiness and longing of my life." - Anita Brookner, "Brief Lives"

"Nothing one could say of Father Vaillant explained him." - Willa Cather, "Death Comes for the Archbishop"

"The great tables of granite set down in an empty plain were inconceivable without their attendant clouds, which were a part of them, as the smoke is part of the censor, or the foam of the wave." - Willa Cather, "Death Comes for the Archbishop"

"She was not a very nice woman, but then neither am I." - Anita Brookner, "Brief Lives"

"When he was not at work, or being actively amused, he went to sleep. He had no twilight stage. But now he enjoyed this half-awake loafing with his brain as if it were a new sense, arriving late, like wisdom teeth." - Willa Cather, "The Professor's House"

"Humanism did indeed concentrate on this world, but usually in tandem with the unseen other. The task of painters was to visualize both." @griffino.bsky.social on "Raphael: Sublime Poetry" at the Met for @commonwealmagazine.org www.commonwealmagazine.org/oleynick-rap...

One of my favorite writers, @calebcrain.bsky.social, on a very good friend's very good book. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Tonight. Topics could include: Satyajit Ray & Ritwik Ghatak; national literatures; modernism is India; where Neil Diamond lived in Brooklyn; more.

Print galleys of OBJECTS OF DESIRE by Adam O'Fallon Price are now available! Winner of the Autumn House Press Fiction Prize, Adam’s unflinchingly honest and deliciously existential stories explore the ways our deepest hunger teases us toward both our best selves.

"It all comes down to this, my dear: one likes the florid style, or one doesn't." - Willa Cather, "The Professor's House"

"He had found that you can train the mind to be active at a fixed time, just as the stomach is trained to be hungry at certain hours of the day." - Willa Cather, "The Professor's House"

What drew so many great British writers and artists to Catholicism in the early twentieth century? @tonydomestico.bsky.social reviews Melanie McDonagh's new book on England's mad rush to Rome:

Next week! What an honor to give this series of lectures named in honor of Barbara Packer, one of the all-time great scholars of the Transcendentalists.

Not sure I've ever bought a book so fast as I just bought Heaven and Hell after reading Joy Williams's piece on it for @bookpostusa.bsky.social books.substack.com/p/review-joy...

"He did not answer, but rolled on me a dark brown eye shining like a fried egg when it is not quite cooked." - Rebecca West, "The Fountain Overflows"

"It crossed my mind that perhaps my mother would have been a difficult wife for any husband, she was too brave about putting things into words." - Rebecca West, "The Fountain Overflows"

Local friends! I’ll be talking with Francine Prose tomorrow afternoon in Montclair!

Late coming to this marvelous and capacious essay on the scope of criticism by @tonydomestico.bsky.social, who by the way has plenty of style to go around! open.substack.com/pub/chronicl...

"It was one of those autumn mornings which are devoid of melancholy, when the weather seems to be cleaning its house." - Rebecca West, "The Fountain Overflows"

"When my sisters and I were little we had noticed that grown-ups' foreheads were often hot and dry, and were sure it had something to do with the way they worried." - Rebecca West, "The Fountain Overflows"

"Like Japanese poetry, her conversation required to be carefully translated into the same language in which it was composed. But it differed from Japanese poetry in being far from brief." - Rebecca West, "The Fountain Overflows"

"He lapsed too easily, for my taste, into anecdote, but that's actors, I suppose. He was so actorly, he seemed at times to be acting the part of an actor." - Gwendoline Riley, "The Palm House"

"Having read, over a lifetime, more than a dozen of Updike’s novels and story collections, it’s always astonishing to me that I find it so hard to actually remember anything about them." Anthony Giardina for @commonwealmagazine.org www.commonwealmagazine.org/updike-lette...

"He had a cold, smooth voice, like a heavy pair of scissors cutting rich fabric." - Gwendoline Riley, "The Palm House"

"If one is unhappy and one's hands are really wet it is a bother to dry them." - Rebecca West, "The Fountain Overflows"

"He was big and stout like Mr. Phillips and should have been jolly like him; and his sad expression looked all wrong on him, it was like a serious person wearing a paper hat." - Rebecca West, "The Fountain Overflows"

"There was no stopping Papa when he was engaged in a crusade for a victory which would bring him no benefit." - Rebecca West, "The Fountain Overflows"

PARK CHAN-WOOK WESTERN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

George Templeton Strong’s diaries “give us not only the sense of an enduring crisis [during the Civil War] but also the feeling of an ongoing quotidian life, the kind of thing that even the best novelists must struggle to achieve.” —Michael Gorra

“If you ask tobacco companies to help write your school’s policy on cigarettes…you’re going to end up with guidance on how to smoke responsibly in school.”

Great piece

"For more than thirty years, since the death of my father in 1953, I had lived without grief. I took the news coldly, therefore; then I had hiccups; then I became concerned." - V. S. Naipaul, "The Enigma of Arrival"

"Depending on herself, she was continually surprised by people." - V. S. Naipaul, "The Enigma of Arrival"

"But his old readiness to snap and cavil and rant was abated or, rather, it ran into, meshed in with, his religious talk." - V. S. Naipaul, "The Enigma of Arrival"

"When one is a child, water tastes better out of a cup than out of a glass, it is the other way round when one is grown-up." - Rebecca West, "The Fountain Overflows"

From behind the paywall, my recent piece on Leslie Fiedler, "Love and Death in the American Novel," and the current state of criticism. chronicleofhighereducation.substack.com/p/was-leslie...

"But to reach the heights of literature, to match the total risk that is love, you can’t go in for irony." A provocative contention from Randy Boyagoda in his piece on Kiran Desai's latest novel for Portico Quarterly. porticoquarterly.com/essay/an-ang...

"He was smiling; his eyes were watering. I knew the expression. The smile wasn't a smile, the tears were not tears. It was just what happened to his face whenever he began to talk about his childhood or early life." - V. S. Naipaul, "The Enigma of Arrival"

"If only he could have lived there, at that pitch, in something like a radio-studio atmosphere, something of that artificial social arrangement, instead of having to go home and be alone." - V. S. Naipaul, "The Enigma of Arrival"

"We sat at a hot green metal table, weather-dulled and sticky, and loud black flies with rainbows in their wings fed at the pools of drying ice cream and then scrubbed their maws meticulously with their forelegs, like house cats." - "Housekeeping"

" ... the part of the vertical iron bar which he had held in this strong lifting way four or five or six times a working day was smoother and much darker than the rest of the iron, which was rusted and rough and dry." - V. S. Naipaul, "The Enigma of Arrival"

"This very slow walk was the way Pitton walked when his work was over, when his time had become his own again." - V. S. Naipaul, "The Enigma of Arrival"

As an editor one of the few newspapers left publishing a decent amount of book reviews and other coverage, I hope you might consider a digital subscription to the Boston Globe. It's not that expensive and look at what we do! www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/

"The noblest impulse, in that colonial setting, had been the most hobbling. To be what I wanted to be, I had to cease to be or to grow out of what I was." - V. S. Naipaul, "The Enigma of Arrival"

"That labor in his garden, after his paid work on the farm, that exhaustion, the pleasures then of food and the drive to the pub, the long, muzzying drinks ..." Muzzying! - V. S. Naipaul, "The Enigma of Arrival"

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley review – the laureate of bad relationships

"The world is against me on this point, but it has always seemed to me that the exiles in the Forest of Arden must have been rejected by their communities on conversational grounds." - Rebecca West, "The Fountain Overflows"

Great piece, and I love the fact that in this picture he looks like he manages a crew of R&B acts from the back lounge of the Hi-Lite Club.

"Nothing was natural here; everything was considered." - V. S. Naipaul, "The Enigma of Arrival"

"Sometimes it seemed to me my grandmother saw our black souls dancing in the moonless cold and offered us deep-dish apple pie as a gesture of well-meaning and despair." - "Housekeeping"