"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
While I wait to get my paws on the right edition of the latest novel, which comes out in April, I caught up with two short stories. The first one is Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy (classified as #2.5, meaning it's right after our favourite SecUnit...
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809–1852) was a Russian-language writer of Ukrainian origin, celebrated for short stories like “The Nose,” “The Overcoat,” and Dead Souls. His fiction combines social satire, grotesque comedy, and a deep concern with moral and spiritual life, and lord knows he isn't a...
Last week I wrote a post about the anxiety many sectors are feeling in the face of AI, and about integrity as a tool to approach the technological shift we're undergoing. It was a good post. I'm happy about that post. Some people reached out,...
S.S. Van Dine was the pen name of Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939), an art critic, editor, and novelist from the US who created Philo Vance, apparently one of the defining amateur detectives of the Golden Age of detective fiction. The Vance series ran to twelve...
This is the third collection I read from these charming little light-blue books with the golden pages, and they're uneven at best. Once again, as such, I have mixed feelings about this collection and I'll have to proceed scientifically to give a rating, so here...
In 1947, British-American poet W.H. Auden published The Age of Anxiety, a long poem subtitled “A Baroque Eclogue”. In a nutshell, four strangers meet in a bar on Third Avenue in Manhattan, on All Souls’ Night, so it's even seasonal, in the middle of a...
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Mikhail Bulgakov (Kyiv, 1891–1940) was a novelist, playwright, and former physician, whom I'm sure you know for The Master and Margarita, published posthumously. His work blends sharp satire, fantasy, grotesque comedy, and moral seriousness, often targeting Soviet bureaucracy and ideological hypocrisy, but I had no...
Conclusion Kovrin received a professorship at the University. The inaugural address was fixed for the second of December, and a notice to that effect was hung up in the corridor at the University. But on the day appointed he informed the students' inspector, by telegram, that...
Chapter 7 One long winter night Kovrin was lying in bed, reading a French novel. Poor Tanya, who had headaches in the evenings from living in town, to which she was not accustomed, had been asleep a long while, and, from time to time, articulated some...
