"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."
Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, an epic work set in a fictional town called Desperance, opens before there are any people in it at all: an ancestral serpent, "a creature larger than storm clouds," descends from the stars and drags itself across the wet clay of the...
The full German title of today's book is Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt — "The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage" — and it was written by W.G. Sebald, a German-born writer, essayist, poet, and literary scholar who lived much of his life...
Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972) was an Argentine poet, translator, and writer of Russian Jewish descent, and one of the most intense and influential voices of mid‑20th‑century Latin America. Born Flora Alejandra in Buenos Aires, she studied philosophy and literature but left academia to devote herself to...
Rilke wasn't chosen at random for this slot, last week, and neither is today's Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, though I'll admit I didn't plan the connection until I went looking for her and found it waiting there already. In the spring of 1926, Tsvetaeva, Rilke, and...
The premise of The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector's mystical novel from 1964 is almost nothing: a sculptor, known to us only by her initials, decides to clean out the maid's room after the maid has left her employment. That's the entire plot. She...
Same poet, different book. Rilke, the Bohemian poet and playwright, already made an appearance in the original list, so I'm well aware that bringing him back on day two of a sequel about not repeating myself is a strange way to start. But the Duino...
There is a particular kind of August laziness that likes to dress itself up as a fashionable pose: you can't undertake significant projects in August, you're not supposed to, apparently, you aren't even supposed to read anything that's too complicated (though I wonder, if you...
Michael Godwin's farm lay tucked away comfortably in a hollow of the South Downs. The downs swept up-wards in all directions around it, and on one side beyond was the sea. The sound of it as it beat against the face of the cliff and...
A small crowd of gold-diggers stood in front of Lowry's shanty as a horse and sulky rattled up the sand track through the mulga. The driver was Lowry, and a murmur of excitement ran through the group when it was seen that he had a...
It was the last house in Beauchamp Row, and it stood several rods away from its nearest neighbour. It was a pretty house in the daytime, but owing to its deep, sloping roof and small bediamonded windows it had a lonesome look at night, notwithstanding...
