“The first reading of some literary work is often, for the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before…what they have read is constantly and prominently present to the mind…[they] mouth over their favourite lines and stanzas in solitude. Scenes and characters from books provide them with a sort of iconography by which they interpret or sum up their own experience.”

Short Fiction

• Celebrity by W. S. Moore, III
• The Idyll of Red Gulch by Francis Bret Harte
• Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson
• An Imaginative Woman by Thomas Hardy
• Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad

Reviews

• Built To Last – “William Trevor’s story collection is frequently melancholy, concerned with loss and disappointment, but warmed with radiant moments of grace or acceptance.”
• Sunset Park by Paul Auster – “An estranged father-son relationship is the center of [Paul Auster’s latest] novel that examines how what we take for granted can come apart.”

Commentary and Criticism

• Making Moral Sense of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim
• The Quotidian of Love – “Revisiting the short fiction of a minimalist master, in search of what will make it last.
• Fantasy Not Just For the Young – Salman Rushdie lists some of his favorite fiction.
• 10 Essential Books from the Last 25 Years – One of which illustrates “socialism’s inherent failings.
• A Libertarian Critique of Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day

News and Miscellany

• Is the iPad Killing the Kindle?
• University of Chicago offers novel by Anthony Powell free as an E-Book during December – A Question of Upbringing, Book 1 of A Dance to the Music of Time trilogy.
• ‘I’m sorry Mr Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language’ – Rejection comments received by famous authors.
• Daily Lit – Alan Jacobs points out a website that emails book installments to readers.
• Flipping Through e-Readers: A skeptic becomes a believer.

Poetry Corner – Emily Dickinson

A Charm Invests a Face

A charm invests a face
Imperfectly beheld,-
The lady dare not lift her veil
For fear it be dispelled.

But peers beyond her mesh,
And wishes, and denies,-
Lest interview annul a want
That image satisfies.

Father, I bring thee not myself

Father, I bring thee not myself,-
That were the little load;
I bring thee the imperial heart
I had not strength to hold.

The heart I cherished in my own
Till mine too heavy grew,
Yet strangest, heavier since it went,
Is it too large for you?

The Writing Life

• Wright’s Writing Corner: Writing the Great Book–Part 1, What Makes a Book Great?
• Beware the Trap of ‘Bore-geous’ Writing