A new story this week, dear friends, The Moslem Wife by Mavis Gallant, first published in The New Yorker in 1976. The story is included...

An interesting thing to note about Lion is that four of the characters—Patrick, Hana, Caravaggio, and Clara—appear in Ondaatje’s next...

In The Skin of a Lion has not one but two scenes in which Patrick Lewis is sketched. Early in the story, his father Hazen “outlined the...

In a previous post having to do with a different book, I wrote about What Do You Do When I Can’t See You—that phenomena in fiction of the...

Let’s consider some implications of the narrative style of In the Skin of a Lion. Umberto Eco suggests that a text contains three...

Last week, I threatened to write about In the Skin of a Lion’s narrative structure. Going to do it today. The book is often described as...

This week, a new story, Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 book, In the Skin of a Lion. At times, the past becomes bit murky, but I believe I first...

The ending of Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is rather open and ambiguous—to me, at least. It’s quite possible Andrew Miller might read my...

The narrational style of Now We Shall Be Entirely Free shifts from beginning to end. We’ve talked about how, in the beginning, it is...

Literary theorist Roland Barthes developed a distinction in literature between readerly and writerly texts. He believed most texts are...

The significance of names in Now We Shall Be Entirely Free should probably be noted. John Lacroix certainly makes one think of the French...

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is a novel written around the year 2018, but the story takes place in the British Isles in 1810 after the...

This week, a new book, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free written by Andrew Miller, published in 2019. I first read it earlier this year,...

An early review of “A Sport and a Pastime,” states that to live for sex alone is to be less than human. I don’t know. On the face of it,...

An oft-noted distinction within literary texts is whether they emphasize showing the characters in action over telling the reader about...

Since writing last week’s post, I’ve been up around three a.m., worrying about what I wrote last time, worrying about the effect of my...

This week, let’s look at how time is handled in “A Sport and a Pastime.” In his great book, “The Perpetual Orgy,” Mario Vargas Llosa...

Last wee k, we began to turn our keen minds toward James Salter’s “A Sport and a Pastime.” Let’s continue. By definition, a work of...

This week, a new work of fiction, “A Sport and a Pastime” written by James Salter, published in 1967. I first learned of Salter belatedly...

Who is the narrator of “Starting Out in the Evening?” Is it Brian Morton? Is he “telling” the story, displaced across space and time to...