A laburnum tree against a blue sky.

Won’t you look at these colours.

I’ll have to get a copy of Iza’s Ballad!

The Door I’ve read, none of the others, but I completely agree, that one was brilliant too!

Magda Szabo, Katalin Street, trans. Len Rix, and Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins

I hit a wall with Musil (one for another day?), but Katalin Street floored me, a history of c20 Hungary that is also the history of a house & its ghosts. Its anger and grief and sorrow are just too much: like a story that doesn’t know how to tell itself, can only watch itself playing out. Loved it.

Mathias Enard, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, trans. Charlotte Mandell

This has lifted me out of a reading slump: Enard, Tell them of Battles, trans. @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social, a beautiful short novel imagining Michelangelo in Constantinople in 1506. A fragmentary book about fragments, drafts, desires, acts of creative imagination, the thrill of translation.

Martha Sprackland · Poem: ‘Dark Night’

There I stayed, and there forgot,
my cheek laid on my Beloved fair.
And all things ceased, and I was lost
and all my worldly doubt and care
were sunk among the lilies there.

‘Dark Night’, a poem by John of the Cross, translated by Martha Sprackland.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

David Trotter · Little and Large: Lydia Davis’s Method The first few pages of Into the Weeds give the impression of someone starting to regret that she ever agreed to conduct...

‘Davis’s skill is to notice the way feeling snags on the various contingencies which by their indifference to its clamour make it visible to itself: a cane, a rug, a furnace, a caterpillar, an old shirt, a plate of chilli.’

David Trotter on why Lydia Davis writes.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"...an area of fascinating growth..."

Just hearing (and thinking) the same thing. Desperate.

Do it, it's brilliant!!

Poster for Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film, The Secret Agent.

This film is a banger and well worth seeing on a big screen if you get the chance.

Agreed! The ending, I thought, was fantastic - so many ways for it to be cheap, or glib, or neat, or just dull - but he got it just right.

Just saw this today, too: it’s outstandingly good, isn’t it!

Q&A with Maria Stepanova about "The Disappearing Act" We’re eagerly awaiting the publication next week of The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova, translated by Sasha Dugdale. Today we’re sharing a special pre-release interview with Maria Stepanova, one ...

‘My own personal choice is to continue writing – simply because that is the only thing I can do to counterbalance the distortion. Someone has to use Russian as a language of love’

- Maria Stepanova on Disappearing Act
@fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social

shop.pushkinhouse.org/blogs/booksh...

Excellent!!

I hadn’t realised! She’s great here!

The 39 Steps

Missed The Secret Agent tonight, so here’s another man on the run…

It’s excellent: I hope you love it just as much!

Maria Stepanova, The Disappearing Act, trans. Sasha Dugdale

“In the summer of 2023 the grass carried on growing as if nothing at all was wrong.” Maria Stepanova, The Disappearing Act, trans. @sashadugdale.bsky.social - I loved In Memory of Memory, and I’m loving this.

Guatave Flaubert, Three Tales, trans. Roger Whitehouse

Flaubert, Three Tales (Trois Contes), trans. Roger Whitehouse. I feel like I should have / must have read this thirty years ago. Maybe I did: thank god for a bad memory. It hit me so hard: the last paragraph of A Simple Heart is so absurd, so devastating, so ecstatic., but all three left me reeling.

Any merit in the drivel I write comes from learning painstakingly how to write essays.

To assay - to test - exactly what I thought and knew about a matter.

Great essayists - Woolf, Orwell, Bacon, Montaigne, Hazlett - are utter intellectual joys as you read how they test themselves on topics too.

It did -- just so good! But I had also forgotten how funny it is, and having a (laughing) audience really brought that out too.

I think I know what you mean, yes 😄, and no, that wouldn't have been my cup of tea either! I don't find this film precious or mannered at all, though, and was really surprised by how un-dated it felt (in spite of being very much of its time). It has an amazing openness to experiment and experience.

Cleo from 5 to 7: my first time seeing this on the big screen. Brilliant, astonishing, overwhelming; this film just has everything.

Thank you! There’s so much love for these books: I’m certainly going to keep going!

I am persuaded!!

I will persevere! So many strong recommendations here, not least yours, which makes me think I just didn’t have my head in the right place for this one. Thank you!

Thank you! Am definitely going to read the third!

Thanks!

I really will stick with it!