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Although Mr. Stevens spends considerable time reflecting on the past during his journey, he is at times confronted by people from the...

Remains has an interesting structure. As I have said, the novel is broken up into a prologue and seven chapters, each one identified by a...

What is the plot in Remains? Well, what is plot? “The main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, devised and presented by the...

In a 1986 Guardian interview, (pre-Remains), Ishiguro writes that he was dissatisfied with his early novels because he judged them as...

Last week, I began our discussion of The Remains of the Day by saying that we’d sniffed out another unreliable narrator—Mr. Stevens, the...

This week, a new story, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1988 The Remains of the Day. (Whiny voice: This week, a new story, Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the...

One of the hallmarks of fiction, one of the things that often keeps us reading, is how the protagonist transforms in the story. Aristotle...

I have written about how Pat is an unreliable narrator in Silver Linings. The unnamed narrator presents Pat’s story as a sort of journal...

I have said that, in Silver Linings, Pat is an unreliable narrator. Let’s look at this more closely. An unreliable narrator is a narrator...

This week a new story, Matthew Quick’s 2008 novel, The Silver Linings Playbook. I first read the book six years ago after seeing the...

What role does transformation play in Grand Central? Transformation is a key element of fiction and of memoir. “A transformation is a...

Last week, I wrestled mightily with the question of whether Grand Central is a memoir or a work of fiction, deciding that the story seems...

‘Kay. I have said that, this week, we should examine Grand Central as a work of fiction. I felt good about the clarity, not exactly smug,...

A week of sleepless nights, best beloved. I’ve been struggling with Grand Central. The personal nature of the story, a possibly...

A new book this week, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 novella, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, weighing in at one-hundred and twelve...

The ending of The Moslem Wife tells us what the story is about—the point—if you will. We talked last week about how the style of the...

What is the style of The Moslem Wife? By way of review, fictional style can be thought of as the implied author, an entity who mediates...

From the outset, the Narrator entity of The Moslem Wife expresses cutting judgements of the characters, skewering their vanities and...

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...