Where literature and art intersect, with an emphasis on W.G. Sebald and literature with embedded photographs
Virginia Woolf. Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing. 2nd ed. Harcourt, 1985. The earliest of the five pieces in Moments of Being is “Reminiscences,” begun in 1907. Written when Woolf was just a fledgling writer, it is addressed to the unborn child of her sister Vanessa, who had just married Clive Bell that […]
Vertigo (Coffee House Press, 2007) is my first book of poems by Martha Ronk, and it won’t be my last. I picked it up because “some of the titles are revised forms of sentences from W.G. Sebald’s novels.” How could I resist? The speakers in Ronk’s poems are often in situations that they themselves don’t […]
This turned out to be a week accidentally dedicated to jazz. Any fan of jazz will enjoy Fred L. Joiner’s wonderful book of poetry, The Mirror in Our Music. It includes two series of poems in which he responds to photographs. I also passed the halfway mark in my way through the fiction of Toni […]
In the week in which June crossed over into July, I read two short books, totaling about 220 pages in all. I’m in the midst of a run of books on the subject of translation, which will probably last for four or five titles, and I’m slowly working my way through the oeuvre of Toni […]
For years I have been writing a paragraph about every book I read as part of my annual Reading Log, which you can find above. Many of the books I read are from smaller, independent presses or were written by writers who aren’t everyday names, and I would like to give them a bit more […]
“It is with sadness that we communicate the passing of the street sweeper, a curious man who came home from the war with a scar above his ear shaped like a pretzel. There was talk he had one of those Japanese microchips in his brain . . . On the weekends he set up a […]
“Nothing was simply one thing.” Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse. If you opened Genevieve Kaplan‘s chapbook Settings for these Scenes (Chicago: Convulsive Editions, 2013) and didn’t know how her poems were made (and you wouldn’t know that until you got to the final page), her first poem might appear to be more or less straightforward, […]
“very far away there are reasons, connections, networks, invisible things working on us and we don’t understand a thing about them.” A small village in rural France in the early 2000s, some forty years after the brutal Algerian War of Independence ended in 1962. Bernard unexpectedly shows up at a party for his sister Solange’s […]
In a promotional email, the publisher New Directions is hyping the idea that Wolfgang Koeppen’s great trilogy of novels written in the early 1950s “has finally returned in Michael Hofmann’s breathtaking translation.” What New Directions really means is that Pigeons on the Grass, The Hothouse, and Death in Rome are all finally being published as a […]
Lettrétage, “an anchor institution for Berlin’s independent literary scene,” has announced a special program devoted to W.G. Sebald in their Berlin space on June 6, 2026, called “Sebald Remembering.” The event website says: “At the heart of Sebald’s work lies a deep understanding of crises, an exploration of the effects of catastrophes on the human […]