This week, a new book, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008. Ms. Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for...

I have said that, in Emigrants, Max Sebald relied for content on the stories of real people, including an unnamed narrator who was...

The last section in Emigrants is entitled Max Ferber. Here, our narrator is a youth in his early twenties who escapes life in Germany...

The third section of Emigrants, Ambros Adelwarth, is all about revenants, people who return, people who are thought of as dead but come...

Last week, I wrote about how Emigrants can be seen as the story of a narrator’s reactions to encounters with four different people—except...

A theme I’d like to pursue in thinking about this remarkable book, is that Emigrants is (among other things) about the effect on the...

In Amazon’s system of classification, Emigrants is found under literature and biography, and the promotion says the book combines...

This week, a new story, The Emigrants by the late German author W.G. Sebald. I’m reading Michael Hulse’s 1996 translation of the 1992...

The last chapter of Remains is entitled Weymouth. It begins with Mr. Stevens sitting on a pier, or boardwalk, by the sea, waiting for the...

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...