Mark Twain, who died a hundred years ago today, entered the world and left with Halley’s Comet. His essays have a permanent place on my bedside table; I read them whenever my own writing stalls. Those perfect verbs, those unexpected but accurate nouns, that distinctive sense of the absurd and limitless ability to evoke it… We’ve had our difficulties, Twain . . .
My appreciation of Deborah Eisenberg’s Collected Stories — which explore “people’s most complex and secret feelings, ‘mental states … that are just on the border of expressible’” — is up at NPR. An excerpt: In an early story, “What it Was Like, Seeing Chris,” a teenager who’s “pale and long” like her little sister but believes she lacks the younger . . .
“Is ignorance bliss? Does stasis prevent suffering?” At Words Without Borders, Emma Garman admires Martin Page’s The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection.
“All the troubles that White Teeth asks us to see as things of the past, from immigration to imperialism, began in the last decade to look like the stuff of our future.”