"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."
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...
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...
I wouldn't have started this book on my own, and for many reasons. One of them is that in Italy it's marketed as Young Adult Fiction, and I hate most of that stuff, and the other is its imposing length: 600 pages. I was distracted,...
Well, you might now it by a different name, because The Violin of the Madman (Il Violino del Pazzo) is just the Italian title for Selma Lagerlöf’s 1899 novella En herrgårdssägen, usually translated into English as The Tale of a Manor or A Manor House...
Ah, Selma Lagerlöf. I haven't read anything of hers since I was a kid and now, all of a sudden, I find myself reading three works of hers in two months. The first one was Men and Troll, a collection of short stories, and it's...
Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) was the most popular and influential writer in modern Yiddish literature, best known for creating Tevye the Dairyman, who inspired the popular musical Fiddler on the Roof. He wrote novels, short stories, plays, and epistolary satire that captured the life, particular humour,...
I have a very fond memory of Selma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson, but I approached this collection of tales with cautious optimism, being what they are. If you take a look at some of the book's reviews on Goodreads, people's main complain...
Two women in Rome, harbouring a resentment over something that seems shallow at first and then, little by little, it becomes spoken and plain, and terrifying. I didn’t know what I was getting into, with this collection of short stories, and it was the titular...
kyklàda.press is an independent, Athens-based publishing project founded in 2020 by artist David Bergé. It produces small books about the Aegean archipelago and the wider cultural, ecological, political, and material realities of island life, with a particular focus on what Mediterranean people have in common,...
I rarely review the classics, because Time is a better judge and there must be a reason if they're classics, which doesn't mean you're bound to like them but it does mean that our opinion (yours and mine, I mean) are scarcely relevant. This time...
