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.”
Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson and a “morbid collector” of evidence of the elder Waugh’s egomania, admires a new investigation into real-life secrets behind Brideshead Revisited.
I used to enjoy curiosities like “How many words did Shakespeare know?” but now I just imagine Language Log’s impending evisceration and regretfully move on.