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This week, a new story, my friends, Irish author Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel, Normal People. Normal People was a bestseller in the United...

Last week, due to constraints of space and time, we interrupted our discussion of Cellists, the last story in Nocturnes. Let’s continue...

In Cellists, the fifth and final story in Nocturnes, we return to the city of Venice but with new characters. The complex narrative...

The fourth story in Nocturnes is entitled Nocturne and is the longest of the five contained therein. Does this have meaning? I don’t...

In the third story of Nocturnes, Malvern Hills, we immediately come on a first-person narrator who is never named. “I’d spent the spring...

The title of the next story in Nocturnes contains another musical reference, Come Rain or Come Shine, the title of a famous American song...

Last week, we began to look at Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, specifically the first tale, Crooner. I cut the diamond in stating that I...

This week a new book, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2009 Nocturnes, originally published in Britain and then by American publisher Knopf in the same...

Last time, we looked at the end of Kino and the way Kino the character transforms, driven to an extreme point by the experience of having...

Kino sets off, leaving a note that the bar will be closed till further notice. He stays at a hotel, goes to the movies, hires a...

When we last left Kino, he’d just had the encounter with the woman burned by cigarettes and was shown feeling ambivalently about her....

Kino’s bar is a modest success. We learn more about “the man.” “My name is Kamita,” he said. It’s written with the characters for “god”...

This week, a new story, Kino, a long short story written by Haruki Murakami. An English version of Kino first appeared in The New Yorker...

A friend recently wrote that he would be interested in my thinking about Steppenwolf in light of recent mass and/or school shootings, as...

Last week, I said, “Although it masquerades as one, this (Steppenwolf) is not a realist novel that attempts to show “life as it really...

– Don Juan, in Carlos Castenada’s The Teachings of Don Juan No coincidence, no story - an ancient Chinese saying. Two mutually exclusive...

Last week, we talked about how the first section of Steppenwolf—after the preface—describes Harry Haller’s painful existence. He is glum,...

Harry Haller’s purported journal begins with a description of his day—written in past tense, something we must return to later. He is, to...

This week, a new book, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, first published in 1927. I am using a Picador edition published in 1963 which...

An important idea is that reading a story changes the reader, that being with a story—and we should say, the implied author of the...