Yesterday I read Francine Du Plessix Gray’s biography of Madame de Stael, entitled Madame de Stael, The First Modern Woman (a silly title, not borne out by the book itself). I thoroughly enjoyed this biography, both in terms of subject (what…
William Hazlitt’s On the Pleasure of Hating is a sometimes charming, sometimes mind-bending, and always intelligent collection of essays by this free-thinking, humanistic, and very exacting nineteenth century philosopher. He makes no big-blown arguments…
Yesterday I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It is a powerful book, an amazing book, a tragedy. There is no “life is wonderful” moment in this novel, but there is survival. Survival and surrender. Oscar Wao is a misfit, an X-man mutant in the Dominican Diaspora…
Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, along with others of their intellectual brethren, left Europe and the overhanging threat of war in the late 1930s and came to Southern California. Life in sunny California was different and…
Ron Rash’s novel beautifully written and compelling One Foot In Eden tells the story of a murder from different perspectives: the investigating sheriff, the accused, the wife of the accused, the son of the murdered man, and the sheriff’s deputy. The looming theme — and the name of the…
The stories of Mary Yukari Waters in the collection The Laws of Evening are simply wonderful. They are perfect renderings of those crucial but often fleeting moments when both life’s beauty and its brevity are recognized. The stories are seamless, creating…
Yesterday I read The Salt-Box House by Jane de Forest Shelton. A book written by someone charmed by her own topic, especially when it is a history, is always beguiling, but when written about one’s own heritage, with family papers, ledgers, journals, heirlooms, and letters…
Haruki Murakami is a man who likes to be alone, who can find a zone of centered concentration and just go with it, whether he is writing or running. But it is not only his ability to focus and to be alone that make him a great writer and a…
H.D. wrote the novel Pilate’s Wife in 1929, revised it in 1934, but then put it away, having been told it could never be published because of its inversion of the story of Jesus Christ: he no longer rises from death on the third day, he never dies at all but…
These were the top 10 stories published by Nina Sankovitch in June of 2009. You can also dive into daily archives for June of 2009 by using the calendar at the top of this page.