Any ending is temporary That becomes clear on the first page of White Teeth, when a despondent Archibald Jones tries gassing himself. The act should have ended Zadie Smith’s novel before the debut had properly begun. But… ‘No one gasses himself on my property,’ Mo snapped as he marched downstairs. ‘We are not licensed.’ Archie …
It is a time of time There was snow last night, I’m told. By the time I was awake, it had been overtaken by grey drizzle. But the mind can play tricks. I can imagine the dancing snow, even as I look out on a pavement dressed in rain. The snowflakes would have whirled in …
Everything showed. Breath pocked the air.Streets curled like matchsticksCaught in their own flare.And the dog scuffed stone with me — noticing,In the transparent avenue, a crack:A wall of coats and handbagsTrailing a casket, shiningly black.And I leant to mourn, to decry the day,To quieten my face and my stride.But I held life by the leash …
Every day, Alain de Botton refuses to touch his trust fund It’s there. Presumably earning interest. But de Botton prefers to live off the sweat of his brow — his own intellectual capital — than rely on his family’s wealth. The fact that philosophy has been good business for de Botton… Well, that’s beside the …
We plunge into The Gunslinger, groping for a beginning On page one, we catch the story by the tail. The gunslinger, Roland, already carries his father’s weapons. They are heavy with bullets. We wonder whether they’ll unload into the man in black. So we’re off — already straining after the finale. And are we any …
Richard Osman has been both sides of the screen Long before he presented television, he watched it, nose smudging the glass. His rule? The closer the better. For when he was a couple of inches of the tube, the flickering reds and blacks took on elaborate life. They became The Dukes of Hazzard. Further back, …
When I dream of Hawaii, the waves are warm, turquoise, and reassuringly strong — nothing like the ‘small, dark-faced, windblown’ waves described by William Finnegan. Go ahead and trust him over my fantasies. I dream. He was there. His autobiography Barbarian Days begins with a boyhood on the islands. Then it moves like a swell …
I’ve been down a rabbit hole, learning about David Foster Wallace. And there’s a lot to sift through. The tennis… the footnotes… the depressive episodes and abusive relationships… the posthumous Pulitzer Prize… My research twisted in on itself. Facts were repeated, underscored. A Sunday afternoon drained away. I heard about Wallace as a good man …
All SaturdayI beamed For the happiness In my breast HappinessLike a dagger The sheath that wasMy chest Happiness so at homeIt became me Ripped ragged as if readyTo rend Bursting and flaringWith radiance A smile beyond lipsWithout end
Aliens crash in a cornfield and set out to conquer Earth… The aliens are petrifying in their strangeness… Humans resist with tanks and planes… That’s a typical sci-fi story — the kind you’d get in pulp magazines from the 1950s: Fantastic Science Fiction or Amazing Stories. Ursula K. Le Guin read those titles as a …
