“The Man-Moth – by Elizabeth Bishop Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.” Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat. It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on, and he makes an inverted pin, the…
Month: October 2017
The 1968 Club, The Great Iris Murdoch Readalong, Nonfiction November & Dewey’s Readathon
Hello, lovely bookish people, The 1968 club is hosted by Karen and Simon, and will take place from 30 October to 5 November. The idea is to have people reading books first published in 1968. They make various clubs, where we all enjoy books from a particular year. I have two 1968 books on my Classics Club list: The Abyss, by Marguerite…
I always lacked common sense when taken by surprise
Dear Anne, Agnes Grey (1847) had for me the strange quality of a double-pointed sword: we must read it carefully, or else it may kill precisely what it had promised to protect. Agnes, the eponymous protagonist and narrator of the story, is the youngest daughter of Richard Grey, a clergyman of modest means. Her mother…
Anne Brontë
Anne Brontë (17 January 1820 – 28 May 1849) was an English writer. She was educated at home, and later attended a boarding school in Mirfield, between 1836 and 1837. Anne worked as a governess between 1839 and 1845. Her poems and novels were first published under the pen name of Acton Bell. She died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the…
The poor child saw her destiny entangling her as in a net
Review: The blood of the vampire, by Florence Marryat (1897)
Florence Marryat
Florence Marryat (9 July 1833 – 27 October 1899) was a British writer. She was privately educated. After her marriage to an officer of the British Army, she travelled extensively through India, and returned alone to England in 1860. The couple had eight children. In the 1870’s, Florence lived together with a Colonel of the Royal Marine Light…
Nostalgia was like a vine, strangling her, sickly scented
Review: The Flesh of the Peach, by Helen McClorey
Helen McClory
Helen McClory is a Scottish writer. She has a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Glasgow. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in 3 AM Press, Necessary Fiction, Smokelong, The Toast, and Phoebe, among other places. She also writes reviews for PANK and The Female Gaze, and can be found at the blog Schietree. Interviews Burning House Press The…
Ripe for the mouths of chance lovers, or birds
“Sub Contra – Louise Bogan Notes on the tuned frame of strings Plucked or silenced under the hand Whimper lightly to the ear, Delicate and involute, Like the mockery in a shell. Lest the brain forget the thunder The roused heart once made it hear,— Rising as that clamor fell,— Let there sound from music’s…
Louise Bogan
Louise Bogan (August 11, 1897 – February 4, 1970) was an American poet. She attended the Girls’ Latin School in Boston, and later entered Boston University. After her freshman year, she won a scholarship to Radcliffe, but decided to leave university to marry in 1916. The couple had a daughter, but separated in 1918. Bogan went to New York to pursue…
Look at the colour of it
Dear Ali, It takes us only a few paragraphs of Autumn (2016) to recognize your characteristic marks: experimental writing; a collage of literary references; a narrative propelled through voice and voice alone; a narrative that mingles past and present, as if they were one thing, happening at once; and, finally, the creative reframing of contemporary…
German Literature Month VII
Hello, bookish people, German Literature Month ist wieder da! Just like in previous years, Lizzy and Caroline will host the 7th GLM (#germanlitmonth) this coming November. During the month, their blogs will be dedicated to literature written in German. On 15th November, Lizzy will be discussing Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of A Polar Bear. On 29th…
I’d forgotten it was summer outside
Dear Barbara, In your novel The Vet’s Daughter (1959), I felt I was being lured into a strange place, tender and cruel. I was being lured by a voice, tenuous but powerful, pushing me through the door into a confined domestic horror. It was lonely, dangerous and grotesque, but it was a voice I very…
Barbara Comyns
Barbara Comyns (Barbara Irene Veronica Comyns Carr, 1907 – 1992) was an English writer. She attended art school in Stratford-upon-Avon, and later moved to London to attend Heatherley School of Fine Art. She had various jobs (dealing in antiques, breeding dogs, drawing for commercial advertisements, cooking in a country house), and began to write professionally in the 1940’s….
She sensed a scream beneath the silence,
Review: The Beautiful Bureaucrat, by Helen Phillips
Dear Helen,
It is difficult to pin down your novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015): a dystopia that reads like a thriller with brief incursions into horror, literary modernism and satire? It’s hard to say. But, by trying too much, and rushing to the tidy end, it might have fallen short of being great in any of these categories.
Helen Phillips
Helen Phillips (1983) is an American writer. She graduated from Yale and has a MFA from the Brooklyn College, where she works as assistant professor. Books And Yet They Were Happy (short-stories, 2011) Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green (children book, 2012, published internationally as Upside Down in the Jungle) The Beautiful Bureaucrat (novel, 2015) Some Possible Solutions (short-stories, 2016)…
