the way the book is written is interesting but I cant tell fiction from reality. did harry dodge admit he is a bottom who cheated on Maggie? wtf was the passage "let our love be silent" about? admits "I have never been able to get with that squirting thing that some people do" hook-up wtf. I haven't found an interview that confronts him on this.

I've just read Kevin Barry's 2018 short story "The Coast of Leitrim", and I think it's exceptional. Some lovely excerpts:

His words blurted at the burn of her brown-eyed stare. She didn’t lose the run of herself by way of a response but she said yes, it is very hot, and he believed that something at least cousinly to a smile softened her mouth and moved across her eyes.

...

The café’s toilet was located right by the kitchen, and Seamus could not but notice what looked like a rota pinned to the back of the kitchen door. Catching his breath one Monday morning, he reached in with his phone and took a photograph, and in this way he had her hours for the week got. Also, her full name.

...

If involved in any level of romance, he was given to lurchy moves and hot declarations, and always in the past he had scared the women off within a few dates.

...

To be able to stand back from and recognize his obsession as exactly that did not lessen its extent nor remove its danger.

...

As the summer aged he became unseated by her trust of him and by her apparent want for him. What kind of a maniac could fall for the likes of me, he wondered. The question was unanswerable and terrifying.

My favorite types of stories are those that put us inside someone we may not otherwise understand (TC Boyle is excellent at this), and those that cause us to recognize ourselves in uncomfortable ways. I've never surreptitiously gotten anyone else's work schedule, or the other things Seamus did, but I think we've all had crushes like this, and felt slightly gross about ourselves for the contents and frequency of our thoughts.

I am surprised that he ended it the way he did. Anyone else?

Often minor characters get the most vigorous and memorable characterization. In Trollope's The Way We Live Now, there is a young attorney, Squercum, who is pretty certain that a financier forged a signature, and pretty certain too that the financier's house of cards is about to tumble. A career opportunity for Squercum. He knows he will catapult from obscurity to prominence if he can be seen as the attack dog whose slaver's colored with the blood of Found-out Fraud.

Here's from his conversation with Bideawhile, attorney for the suspected forger (whom the reader knows is guilty of the exact count of which Squercum would charge him). You can hear Squercum licking his figurative lips, and his gloating sham deferential respect was one of the book's highlights for me:

. . . Squercum raged among the Bideawhiles, who were unable

altogether to shut their doors against him. They could not dare to bid defiance to Squercum,—feeling that they had themselves blundered, and feeling also that they must be careful not to seem to screen a fault by a falsehood. "I suppose you give it up about the letter having been signed by my client," said Squercum to the elder of the two younger Bideawhiles.

"I give up nothing and I assert nothing," said the superior

attorney. "Whether the letter be genuine or not we had no reason to believe it to be otherwise. The young gentleman's signature is never very plain, and this one is about as like any other as that other would be like the last."

"Would you let me look at it again, Mr. Bideawhile?" Then the letter

which had been very often inspected during the last ten days was handed to Mr. Squercum. "It's a stiff resemblance;—such as he never could have written had he tried it ever so."

"Perhaps not, Mr. Squercum. We are not generally on the lookout for

forgeries in letters from our clients or our clients' sons."

"Just so, Mr. Bideawhile. But then Mr. Longestaffe had already told

you that his son would not sign the letter."

"How is one to know when and how and why a young man like that will

change his purpose?"

"Just so, Mr. Bideawhile. But you see after such a declaration as that

on the part of my client's father, the letter,—which is in itself a little irregular perhaps—"

"I don't know that it's irregular at all."

"Well;—it didn't reach you in a very confirmatory manner. We'll just

say that. What Mr. Longestaffe can have been at to wish to give up his title-deeds without getting anything for them—"

"Excuse me, Mr. Squercum, but that's between Mr. Longestaffe and us."

"Just so;—but as Mr. Longestaffe and you have jeopardised my client's

property it is natural that I should make a few remarks. . . .

A pair of deft passages that I appreciated recently. In both cases, we're talking about unpleasant topics, but the authors' technical skill permits them to address the unpleasantness without crudeness:

In Say Nothing, which is about the Troubles, we hear about the Dirty Protest, where IRA- and INLA-aligned prisoners in the Long Kesh prison near Belfast smeared feces on their cell walls in an escalation of a protest against a policy that removed their political prisoner protections. Each prisoner would be hosed down, and his cell scrubbed clean, but

a single metabolic cycle would furnish him with the tools to despoil it.

Spoiler here, this happens close to the end of The Innocents by Michael Crummey:

The whole novel is full of gems like this, but this one struck me as particularly well done. The context is that a young woman is pregnant and showing, and doesn't want to be, and she's lying in bed with a young man:

She wouldn't let his arm circle around, not wanting to arouse suspicions that would complicate the delicate balance of her denial.

And a closing line from Robert Frost, whose poem "Out, Out—" has the most grisly description of an injury I've ever read, without describing a drop of blood (emphasis mine):

At the word, the saw,

As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,

Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—

He must have given the hand. However it was,

Neither refused the meeting.

"Everyone I’ve ever seen with a hole like this," the dentist says, "was

going out of his mind with pain. The pain is so intense that the patient often becomes unable to situate it, which makes the anamnesis difficult."

If 'anamnesis' is new to you: it means "medical history".]

The dentist is from Jennie Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone. The patient is a refugee, Rufu, who had been expelled from Libya, landed in Italy maybe in 2008, and now, in 2015, is waiting for the German beaurocracy to deport him to Italy.

Rufu had been going out of his mind with pain, and without enough German to explain what was wrong. To calm him down, he was dosed with an antipsychotic medicine, which left shambling, disoriented, affectless, heading toward collapse.

Richard, the cultivated, retired history professor who is the novel's protagonist, intercedes. Before the source of the pain is diagnosed, Richard is reading about the medicine's side effects. Something triggers a recollection of a Bach piece about exhaustion and defeat, where the lyric "I have had enough" figures repeatedly.

The lyric is interspersed with the medication warnings:

At home, Richard looks up the side effects online: *Impairment of the

vocal chords, blockage of the respiratory passages, dificulty speaking, dificulty swallowing, cough, pulmonary infection due to inhaled food in the respiratory tract.*

Why is Richard suddenly remembering that

Bach cantata? Maybe it was hearing Yussuf, the flipped-out future engineer, shouting Ich habe genug! — I’ve had enough! — in front of the Spandau residence. Ah! Would that from the bondage of my body/The Lord might free me./Ah! My departure, were it here/With joy I’d say to thee, O world/I have now had enough. Viral infection, ear infection, eye infection, stomach or sinus infection, bladder infection, subcutaneous infection, anomalous ventricular depolarization. . . . Slumber now, ye eyes so weary/Fall in soft and calm repose!/World, I dwell no longer here,/Since I have no share in thee/Which my soul could offer comfort. Low blood pressure, dizziness accompanying change of position, accelerated or slowed heart rate, disorientation, low energy, muscle weakness or pain, anomalous posture. Here I must with sorrow reckon,/ But yet, there, there I shall witness/Sweet repose and quiet rest. Discomfort in the chest, skin inflammation, reduced appetite, impaired locomotion and balance, impaired speech, chills and fever, painful sensitivity to light. My God! When comes that blessed “Now!”/ When I in peace shall walk forever/ In the sand of earth’s own coolness/ And there within thy bosom rest?/My parting is achieved/O world, good night! Numbness of the face, arms, or legs, stroke, ringing in the ears, loss of consciousness. Rejoicing do I greet my death,/Ah, would that it had come already/I’ll escape then all the woe/ Which doth here in the world confine me.

What had snow-covered Rufu said?

Tutto é finito.

July, 1914, Jewish Harlem, Manhattan. Ira is 8. His uncle Max is one of four members of his mother's family, émigrés who have -- just an hour ago -- arrived from Austria-Hungary. Here is the passage from early in A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park:

An hour after the new arrivals had installed themselves in the apartment—it was to be Ira’s earliest, earliest recollection of his uncle Max—the young immigrant invited his boy-nephew to guide him to the pushcart mart under the railroad overpass on Park Avenue. There, he asked Ira to inquire as to the price of two small carrots. They cost one cent. Max produced the copper, and Ira made the purchase. How neatly, how deftly Max scraped the carrots clean with his penknife—and then proffered his nephew the smaller of the two roots:

“But it’s raw!” Ira drew back. “Nobody eats a raw carrot, Uncle.”

“Ess, ess," Max urged (in Yiddish). “Taste. It’s sweet." And to Ira’s surprise, so it was: sweet and crunchy. The memory, the fading composite of the vaguely smiling Max, the produce on the pushcarts, the penknife peeling a carrot, the warmth of summer, and the contrast between the shadow under the huge steel canopy of the railroad trestle and the bright sunlight on the sidewalk would condense for Ira into the first inference he was ever conscious of as inference: From that summery composite, he could deduce the kind of life that was lived by Mom and her family, by Zaida, Baba and the rest in the lethargic, Galitzianer hamlet named Veljish. The moist, orangy, peeled carrot at the core of recollection substantiated all that Mom had told him: about the meagerness of rations, about the larder kept under lock and key . . .

-- Henry Roth, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park

The surprise enjoyment of the carrot is a nice sketch: a rustic in an ultra-urban locale demonstrates an unsuspected knowledge.

But what I thought was most notable was the narrator's decision to butt in with his comment on the mental process of inference. Italics, even. It's explicitly about the mechanics of knowing, illustrative of Ira's growth. But it doesn't get didactic. "Composite" used twice in the second paragraph; "earliest, earliest" in the first; those two things establish a verbal mood of reaching back into the welter of experience. The moment of the boy's gaining expanding awareness is accompanied by a "moist, orangy" crunch. Roth is shooting here to get at what a memory of a mental milestone is like, and hits his mark.

Perhaps due to my own issues with reproductive futurism, I’ve always been a little spooked by texts addressed to or dedicated to babies, be they unborn or infant. Such gestures are undoubtedly born from love, I know. But the illiteracy of the addressee—not to mention the temporal gap between the moment of the address and that at which the child will have grown into enough of an adult to receive it (presuming one ever becomes an adult in relation to one’s parents)—underscores the discomfiting fact that relation can never be achieved in a simple fashion through writing, if it can be achieved at all. It frightens me to involve a tiny human being in this difficulty, this misfiring, from the start. And yet certain instances have undeniably moved me, such as Andre Breton’s letter to his infant daughter in Mad Love. Breton’s hetero romanticism is, as always, hard to take. But I like the sweet assurance he offers his daughter, that she was "thought of as possible, as certain, in the very moment when, in a love deeply sure of itself, a man and a woman wanted you to be."

Insemination after insemination, wanting our baby to be. Climbing up on the cold exam table, abiding the sting of the catheter threaded through the oval slit of my cerix, feeling the familiar cramp of rinsed, thawed seminal fluid pooling directly into my uterus. You holding my hand month after month, in devotion, in perseverance. They're probably shooting egg whites, I said, tears sprouting. Shhh, you whispered. *shhh.

From The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

I like the way it dwells on the topic of looking forward to a child but from divergent angles -- what is meant by addressing a future adult -- to a specific "hetero romantic" shrouding scene to a queer unromantic scene biospecficity.

From Cortés and Montezuma a short fiction by Donald Barthleme

Down by the docks, Cortés and Montezuma walk, holding hands. Cortés has employed a detective to follow Montezuma; Montezuma has employed a detective to follow Father Sanchez. “There are only five detectives of talent in Tenochtitlán," says Montezuma. “There are others, but I don’t use them. Visions are best — better than the best detective.”

Atop the great Cue, or pyramid, Cortés strikes an effigy of the god Blue Hummingbird and knocks off its golden mask; an image of the Virgin is installed in its place.

“The heads of the Spaniards,” says Doña Marina, “Juan de Escalante and the five others, were arranged in a row on a pike. The heads of their horses were arranged in another row on another pike, set beneath the first.”

Cortés screams.

Post any epigraph and its source here in this thread, any comments in reaction are welcome too -- about the epigraphs themselves, the book they adorn, or the writing from which they're culled.

You don't usually think of Herman Wouk as writing "literary fiction." He had a lot of bestsellers. And his works don't feature puzzling juxtapositions, no flowery prose, or knotty style, or passion for social reform. And most of all -- he's wholesome. He writes about right and wrong, even when or especially when the reader and characters are confused about what is right and wrong in the situations he sets up, or when the most right-minded characters are in the wrong cause.

So maybe the work isn't "literary." But it makes a good run at being literature. Here's a passage from the beginning of The Caine Mutiny, one of his earlier novels.

Background: Willie is a rich boy, pampered, a Manhattanite, , a recent Princeton grad, affable but spoiled and aimless. He performs as a nightclub pianist and has a modest talent for witty songs. Given that it's the depression and the start of WWII, he seems frivolous, privileged.

The paragraphs before this told us he's about to fall in love with May Wynn -- the reader knows her name before Willie does:

He arrived at the Tahiti on that slushy, drizzly day to play the piano for auditions of new acts. The Club Tahiti was dreary in all times and and weathers, but most so in the afternoons. The gray light came in then through the street door and showed bare spots in the frowzy red velvet hangings of the lobby, and black blobs of chewing gum ground into the blue carpet, and blisters in the orange paint that covered the door and its frame. And the nude girls in the South Seas mural looked peculiarly mottled by reason of spatterings of drink, frescoes of tobacco smoke, and layers of plain grime. Willie loved this place exactly as it was. Looking as it did, and smelling as it did of stale tobacco, liquor, and cheap deodorant perfume, it was his domain of power and achievement.

Two girls were sitting near the piano at the far end of the chilly room. The proprietor, a pale fat man with gray stubbly jowls and a face marked with deep soured lines, leaned on the piano, chewing a half-burned cigar and leafing through a musical arrangement.

“Okay, here’s Princeton. Let’s go, girls.”

Willie shed his dripping galoshes by the piano, stripped off his brown rabbit-lined gloves, and sat at the stool in his overcoat, inspecting the girls with the horse trader’s eye of a man of twenty-two. The blonde stood and handed him her music. “Can you transpose at sight, honey? It’s in G, but I'd rather take it in E-flat,” she said, and from the twanging Broadway tones Willie knew at once the pretty face was an empty mask, one of hundreds that floated around Fifty-second Street.

“E-flat coming up.” His glance wandered to the second singer, a small nondescript girl in a big black hat that hid her hair. Nothing doing today, he thought.

The blonde said, “Here’s hoping this cold of mine doesn’t ruin me completely. Can I have the intro?” She plowed through Night and Day with determination, and little else. Mr. Dennis, the proprietor, thanked her and said he would telephone her. The small girl took off her hat and came forward. She placed an unusually thick arrangement on the music rack in front of Willie.

“You might want to look at this piece, it’s slightly tricky.” She raised her voice to address the proprietor. “Mind if I keep my coat on?”

“Suit yourself, dear. Just let me look at your figure sometime before you go.”

“Might as well look at it now.” The girl opened her loose brown waterproof coat and turned completely around.

“That’s fine,” said Mr. Dennis. “Can you sing, too?”

Willie, examining the music, missed the view, though he turned to look. The coat was closed again. The girl regarded him with a slight mischievous smile. She kept her hands in her pockets. “Docs your opinion count, too, Mr. Keith?” She made a pretense of opening the coat.

Willie grinned. He pointed to the arrangement. “Unusual.”

“Cost me a hundred dollars,” said the girl. “Well, ready?”

The arrangement was no less ambitious a piece than Cherubino’s love song from The Marriage of Figaro, with words in Italian. Midway it broke into a syncopated parody in clumsy English. At the end it returned to Mozart’s music and Da Ponte’s words. “Haven’t you something else?” Willie said, noting that the singer had amazingly bright brown eyes and a handsome mass of chestnut-colored hair rolled up on her head. He wished he could see her figure, and this was a strange wish, since he was indifferent to small girls and disliked reddish hair; a fact he had explained away as a sophomore with the aid of Freud’s theories as a repressive mechanism of his Oedipus complex.

“What’s the matter? You can play it.”

“I don’t think,” said Willie in a stage whisper, “that he’ll like it. Too high-class.”

“Well, just once, for dear old Princeton, shall we try?”

Willie began to play. The music of Mozart was one of the few things in the world that affected him deeply. He knew the aria by heart. As he called the first notes out of the battered yellowing keyboard scarred with cigarette burns, the girl leaned against the piano, resting one arm on the top so that her hand, loosely closed, hung over the edge near his eyes. It was a little hand, rather more square of palm than a girl’s should be, with short, thin, strong fingers. Roughness around the knuckles told of dishwashing.

The girl seemed to be singing for the pleasure of friends, rather than for an urgently desired job. Willie’s ear, trained by many years of opera-going, told him at once that this was no great voice, nor even a professional one. It was just such singing as a bright girl who had a love of music and a pleasant voice could accomplish, and it had that peculiar charm denied great performers, the caroling freshness of song for its own sake.

The melody filled the gloomy cellar with radiance. The blonde, going out at the door, turned and stopped to listen. Willie looked up at the girl, smiled, and nodded as he played. She returned the smile, and made a brief gesture of plucking the imaginary guitar accompaniment of Susanna. The motion was full of casual humor and grace. She sang the Italian words with a correct accent, and apparently knew what they meant.

“Watch for the break,” she suddenly whispered at him in a pause of the singing. She reached down in a darting movement, turned the page, and pointed. Willie swung into the jazzed-up portion of the arrangement. The singer stood away from the piano, spread her hands in the conventional pose of all night-club singers, and ground out a chorus, moving her hips, wrinkling her nose, affecting a Southern accent, smiling from ear to ear, throwing her head back on every high note, and twisting her wrists. Her charm was obliterated.

The jazz part ended. As the arrangement returned to Mozart, so did the girl to her natural ease. Nothing could be pleasanter, thought Willie, than the negligent way she leaned against the piano with hands deep-thrust in her coat pockets, and trilled the fall of the song. He played the last after-echo of the melody with regret.

The proprietor said, “Darling, do you have any standard stuff with you?”

“I have Sweet Sue, Talk of the Town — that’s all with me, but I can do more — ”

“Fine. Just wait, will you? Willie, come inside a minute.”

The proprietor’s office was a green-painted cubicle in the rear of the cellar. The walls were plastered with photographs of actors and singers. The light was a single bulb dangling from the ceiling. Mr. Dennis wasted no money on decorations not visible to customers.

“What do you think?” he said, applying a match to a cigar stump.

“Well, the blonde is no barn-burner.”

“Guess not. What about the redhead?”

“Ah — what’s her name?”

“May Wynn,” said the proprietor, squinting at Willie, possibly because of the burning cigar end an inch from his face.

Occasionally a name is spoken that sets up a clamor in one’s heart, as though it has been shouted in a big empty hall. Often as not the feeling proves a delusion. In any case, Willie was shaken by the pronouncing of the words, “May Wynn.” He said nothing.

“Why? What did you think of her?”

“What’s her figure like?” replied Willie.

The proprietor choked over his cigar, and flattened its meager remains in an ashtray. “What’s that got to do with the price of herring? I’m asking you about her singing.”

“Well, 1 like Mozart,” Willie said dubiously, “but — ”

“She’s cheap,” said Mr. Dennis meditatively.

“Cheap?” Willie was offended.

“Salary, Princeton. Couldn’t be cheaper without bringing pickets around. I don’t know. Could be that Mozart thing would be a delightful novelty — distinction, class, charm. Could also be that it would clear out the place like a stink bomb Let’s hear how she does something straight.”

May Wynn’s Sweet Sue was better than her previous jazz singing — possibly because it wasn’t inserted in a framework of Mozart. There was less of hands, teeth, and hips, and a paling of the Southern accent.

“Who’s your agent, dear — Bill Mansfield?” said Mr. Dennis.

“Marty Rubin,” said May Wynn, a little breathlessly.

“Can you start Monday?”

“Can I?” gasped the girl.

“Okay. Show her around, Princeton,” said Mr. Dennis, and vanished into his office. Willie Keith and May Wynn were alone among the fake palm fronds and coconuts.

It seems that everyone goes down the “what if…” rabbit hole at some point in their lives. The following chapter in The Midnight Library so perfectly renders the “what if…” spiral irrelevant. I love how Haig blends hope and possibility and contentment together to create a beautifully balanced perspective of one’s life.

"It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It is the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

We just have to close our eyes and savor the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive and we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

We only need to be one person.

We only need to feel one existence.

We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on forever.

Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential.

The impossible, I suppose, happens via living.

Will my life be miraculously be free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, lonliness, depression? No.

But do I want to live?

Yes. Yes.

A thousand times, yes."

Today we had a post linking to Saunder's Adams. Now two posts (do I hear three?). One thing I want to do in canonade is enumerate connections between scenes in different books/stories. I know this is moving away from "close reading", because it's looking at superficial similarities. Nevertheless, it's in line with the sub's goal of gathering specific passages -- gathering and cataloging can precede, accompany, and test analysis, and yield their own inky pleasure.

One element in this story is children in peril. And I realized a few things I've read recently features the same . . . unsurprising as it's one of the most popular topics in narrative of any type - Macbeth, Herod & the innocents (Matt 2:16), The Sound of Music. . .

There are a bunch of things in Adams -- domestic abuse, biblical reference, a neighborhood's reaction to a bad neighbor, peril from fire . . . dozens and dozens . . . that could tie it to passages in other books. There is husband-wife violence & menace in Byatt's Babel Tower, an unpopular neighbor in Gass's Mrs Mean, Deuteronomical references in a few books, peril from fire in Name of the Rose... Yes, superficial but . . . scenes and passages are the molecules of meaning. I'd be happy to see posts, digressions about any of those elements -- scenes/passages in books relating to any of those elements, that is.

That said.... Scenes, passages about Children in Peril:

In Adams, the narrator is worried about a weirdo who stares at his children

In Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone African workers in Libya are forced into crowded boats, water runs out and only the children get fresh water. We know already that most of them will die when the boat capsizes.

In Red Plenty, a professor must send her son to school after she knows she has been condemned by the party and he will face the brunt of ostracism - not physical peril but Spufford mixes the scene with an antisemetic scene to escalate the feeling of mother's sorro

In The Argonauts Maggie Nelson says she will not write about her son's sickness with a nerve toxin but in that digressive book which is usually abstract or ungentle there is a single sentence that she would get into the hospital crib with him and not want to move until she sees hope: the not-writing is impressive there.

The Quincunx is largely about a boy (later an adolescent) who's death would profit others who won't scruple at murder; but there's a specific series of scenes where he and another kid are in the London sewers looking for coins or anything salable that is nervous-making and sustained. At one point his comrade is trapped and water is rising -- it's not clear to the reader if the trapped kid is in league with some of the people who'd like to see the protagonist dead and if the protagonist should save him. . . it works ewll.

"It was if I'd sent the hunting dog that was my talent out across a meadow to fetch a magnificent pheasant and it had brought back, let's say, the lower half of a Barbie doll."

He's talking in his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain about the thrilling yet disappointing moment of finding his voice as a writer. Anyone familiar with Saunders knows he's got an unmistakable style that's irreverent, absurd, comical, wildly strange but deep at the same time. Here's a story he wrote in 2004, probably about the Iraq War, called "Adams".

Like Saunders, I desperately want to be the next Joyce or Pynchon or Morrison, and instead my critique group keeps saying, "I don't understand what's going on here." Sometimes I want to feed them something from Beloved to see what they say. But they're probably right about my writing, and Saunders is probably right here. You're never going to get a Booker by trying to be someone else.

Ahoy there. Last week I asked you all to name any scene and netted nothing by way of conversation. So I'll try a more specific bait.

From the list below what is the first scene that you think of in related to any of the titles below? Or even the first association -- if you remember a mentor telling you about a scene, or something from a movie. If "To the Lighthouse" makes you think of Elizabeth Taylor and you think of Stella!, that's fine

1984
The Great Gatsby
The Catcher In The Rye
Crime And Punishment
Catch-22 The Adventures Of Tom And Huck Finn
Moby-Dick One Hundred Years Of Solitude
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Grapes Of Wrath
Lolita
Pride And Prejudice
The Lord Of The Rings
Brave New World
Ulysses
Jane Eyre
Wuthering Heights
The Brothers Karamazov
Great Expectations
To The Lighthouse

The lists is from A pretty plausible 100 list -- top 100 what? Top 100 of the type of thing the 20 titles below suggest.

While I enjoy philosophy books, children's books always impart the same messages on life with more vivacity. Below are two of my favorite excerpts from The Beatryce Prophecy that convey what it is to be human and to be actively engaged in life:

"His heart was heavy, too. It was, he reckoned, a heart full of too many things. It carried the letters of the alphabet, waiting to be fashioned into words. It carried Granny Bibspeak, and his parents, and Beatryce [....] The goat was in his heart, too. Seemingly, the heart could hold an untold amount of things--letters and people and goats and bees" (p 176).

"What does then change the world? [....] Love. Love, and also stories" (p 247).

If you haven't read this book, set aside a couple hours. You'll love it!

Shortly before the conference came to an end, before the balloting, during the final, crucial session, the fear had suddenly left him. It had been replaced by curiosity. By the time he faced the inevitable interviews he was cheerful, surprised at the ease with which he trotted out the phrases: growth, expansion, conciliation, tariff autonomy, correlation of interests, looking back, looking ahead, the common ground of the early days—which allowed the sprinkling of a few discreet autobiographical details, his role in the development of a democratic press—the advantages and dangers of bigness, the invaluable role of both work force and unions, struggling not in confrontation but shoulder to shoulder. Much of what he said had actually sounded quite convincing even to his own ears, although Rolf’s trenchant analyses and Kortschede’s gloomy predictions were beginning to acquire more and more credibility in spite of the fundamentally different premises on which they were based. He had enjoyed weaving in allusions to history, even to art, cathedrals and Menzel, Bismarck and Van Gogh, whose social (or perhaps even incipient socialist) energy and missionary zeal had found their outlet in art; Bismarck and Van Gogh as contemporaries: brief, thoughtful observations on this theme added color to the purely economic statements expected of him. He had been able to recapture a seemingly off-the-cuff elegance which, more than forty years earlier, had proved so useful in Truckler’s seminar and which he had later been able to exploit at numerous editorial conferences but until now had never been able to bring off in public.

• The translator gives me confidence with 'trotted out' and 'bring off'
• Boll establishes duplicy first wiht 'trotted out' and then 'sounded convincing even to his own ears'
• The characterization of him as a cultured intellectual with a common touch is slick
• Moreover he probably gave his life to money and power and turned away from his talents in "Truckler's seminar"

That sentence: "Much of what he said had actually sounded quite convincing even to his own ears, although Rolf’s trenchant analyses and Kortschede’s gloomy predictions were beginning to acquire more and more credibility in spite of the fundamentally different premises on which they were based." -- that is compact, balanced, a three way convergence: the two analyses and what he foresees -- diverging from the whatever rosier expectation he has just nurtured. Eloquent, coiled, without prettified excess.

The translation really is euphonis, eh? Leila Vennewitz.

Excerpt below is from a Gerald Murnane story. You can read the full story here

Murnane uses repetition a lot like in this passage you'll see "mice" and "years". He won't make his sentences more varied or graceful by using a pronoun, or making a compound sentence, and it creates an unartful, insistent tone.

Most of his writing is not as vividly weird as the stuff below about mice in flooding gutters but it's always intensenly private, un-plotty, always weird. And good.

Setting: The narrator here has picked his son up from school after the son got drenched in a thunderstorm. Now narrator and son are back home, the son has dried off, had a nebulizor treatement for asthma, and is havving having a cocoa, talking to dad:

For three or four weeks, my son said, the science class had been looking forward to the coming of the mice. The science teacher had told them she had ordered fifty mice from a laboratory. She had planned with the class beforehand a series of experiments. Small numbers of mice would be put into separate cages. Some mice would be allowed to breed. Each child in the class would be responsible for feeding and observing one of the cages of mice.

The mice had been due to arrive at the school, so my son told me, on that very morning, but they had failed to arrive. My son had cleaned the cage where his mice were going to be kept. He had set out a small heap of torn paper for the mice to use as lining for their cardboard nest-box. But the science teacher had announced to the class at the beginning of the last period of the day that the people supplying the mice had let her down. The mice had not come, and she was going to have to spend most of the science period telephoning to find out what had happened to the mice. While she was out of the room, the teacher had said, the class could use the time for private study. And then, so my son had told me, the teacher had left the room and he had spent the rest of the period talking with his friends or watching the approach of the storm.

While I listened to my son I felt a sorrow for some person or some thing that I could not have named. I might have been sorry for my son and his friends because they had waited so long for the mice that had not come. Or I might have been sorry for the teacher because she had had to disappoint her class, or because she had had to lie to the class (because she had neglected to order the mice, or because she had learned many days before that the mice would never arrive but had been afraid to tell her class). Or I might have been sorry for the mice because the taxi truck bringing them to the school had overturned during the storm, and the boxes containing the mice had tumbled out on to the road and had burst open, after which the mice had crawled around on the wet grey road, confused and bedraggled, or had been swept away in the fast-flowing water in the gutters.

Each time my son had said the word mice he had made faint signs with his eyes and his mouth and his shoulders. Probably no one but myself would have noticed the signs. He had turned his eyes just a little to one side and had stretched his mouth outwards just a little at each corner and had hunched his shoulders just a little. When I had seen that my son was making these faint signs, I had found occasion myself to speak the word mice and to make faint signs in return when I spoke the word.

The faint signs were the last traces of the signs that my son and I had made to one another during earlier years of his childhood whenever either of us had talked about mice or other small furred animals. During those years, whenever he or I had spoken the word mouse or the word mice in the other's hearing, each of us would have peered from the sides of his eyes and hunched his shoulders close to his head and stretched his mouth wide and held his hands in front of his chest in the shape of paws.

In earlier years I had always understood my son's signs as telling me that he was a mouse at heart. He was telling me that he was smaller than other children and made weak by his asthma. When I made my own signs in return in those years, I was telling my son that I recognised his mouseness and that I would never forget to put into his saucer each day a little heap of rolled oats and a cube of bread with vegemite and a scrap of lettuce, or to put a heap of torn paper in a corner of his cage when nights turned chilly.

When my son had made his faint signs to me on the afternoon of the storm, he seemed to be saying that he would always be partly mouse. He seemed to be saying that he had not forgotten my telling him five years before that he would be free from asthma after five years had passed; he had not forgotten, but he knew that what I had told him was not true. He seemed to be saying that he remembered every day what I had told him five years before; he had remembered it while he wheezed and gasped on his way home during the storm that had just passed over; but he knew that I had told him what I had told him only so that he could believe in earlier years that he would one day cease to be a mouse.

On the afternoon of the storm my son seemed to be telling me also that his life as a mouse was not unbearable; he had not been unhappy while he walked home through the rain; he was not unhappy now while he sat with me and watched the last of the clouds drifting towards the hills north-east of Melbourne. He seemed to be telling me finally that he was telling me these things because he understood that I too was partly mouse and would always be so.

What's something we should do to make this sub more valuable? Suggestions about rules, prompts, periodic posts, or attracting more readers, all are related and welcome.

Thank you!

Lying in a darkened, hot bedroom, listening to the creaks and murmurs that come to her from a houseful of family and guests, Emily, a mother of three, hoping to put off the migraine she senses coming.

Habitual fretting about her children, her husband, her sister,

the help, had rubbed her senses raw; mother love and, over the years, many hours of lying still on her bed, had distilled from this sensitivity a sixth sense, a tentacular awareness that reached out from the dimness and moved through the house, unseen and all-knowing. Only the truth came back to her, for what she knew, she knew. The indistinct murmur of voices heard through a carpeted floor surpassed in clarity a typed—up transcript; a conversation that penetrated a wall or, better, two walls, came stripped of all but its essential twists and nuances. What to others would have been a muffling was to her alert senses, which were fine-tuned like the cat’s whiskers of an old wireless, an almost unbearable amplification. She lay in the dark and knew everything. The less she was able to do, the more she was aware. But though she sometimes longed to rise up and intervene, especially if she thought Briony was in need of her, the fear of pain kept her in place. At worst, unrestrained, a matching set of sharpened kitchen knives would be drawn across her optic nerve, and then again, with a greater downward pressure, and she would be entirely shut in and alone. Even groaning increased the agony.

I don't know what it is to be incapacitated by pain, but I do know what it is to be distraught with worry and to lie alone, knowing the burden of the little sounds, with no process of deduction or assembling of detail, but to know by the duration of a floorboard's creak that Maria is unable to look at her sister, or that my son has made himself late for his job. And McEwan captures that unwelcome extended consciousness.

The description of the pain was effective to me and made me wince, though I've never felt anything like that -- and Emily's not feeling it here, either, she's waiting for it. But I think that apprehension drives home the misery of her extreme awareness of what is going on in the house.

May 14 - Any scene you ever read

You can write about anything germane in Fours and Tens, but the topicality of the day for May 14 is:

What is any scene you ever read that you remember?

Any scene you care to mention: genre fiction, great lit, a crazy story from BitterWaitress. Whether you got something to say about it or you got nothing to say about it.

When I think of books I enjoyed, I remember the act of reading, where I was, the mood it put me in, the personality of the voice, more frequently than I remember a specific scene.

Start off with any scene you remember - or maybe misremember. If it's a spoiler, write in a veiled way or hit it with spoiler tags.

Alternately or additionally, if there are books where you clearly remember a mood, and can't remember any scenes, write about the mood.

Why Fours and Tens

In Borges's library, rightly called the universe, "each book is made up of four hundred and ten pages." I like asymmetry, allusion, arbitrariness, so I'm going to say henceforth that "talk about whatever" threads will be on days that end with 4 and 0, and be flaired "fours and tens".

Project Windmill

Project Working Name Windmill comes of the same impetus as Borges's story, and I'll frequently have Mention-a-scene-that-involves-X in conjunction with that. Those "X"s are selected from the entire universe of what literature can deal with, or might be able to deal with if whatever constrains its actual reach were to vanish.

Periodic posts

I'll also start posting excerpts from Herbert S. Read's English Prose Style, Pound's ABC of Reading, and some passages from Shakespeare or other ultra-canonical works and asking subscribers to mention scenes, however tenuously related.

Twitter accumulator

I want to harvest you-all's creativity/voice for twitter posts from https://twitter.com/canonadian. I'm going to ask you to ransack previous posts and try to make tweet(s) out of one or any.

Here are a couple nice passages, one from Henry James, the other from Moncrieff's translation of Proust. Commentary is by critic Adam Gopnick. This is from the New Yorker.

The article is about Moncrieff's translation, Gopnick is suggesting that Henry James "voice" is evident.

James’s is a very odd kind of autobiography where, as often happens

in Proust, there is no obvious hierarchy of incidents: anything remembered matters. . . . . To this ear, at least, echoes of James’s memoirs are everywhere in Moncrieff’s Proust, with an abundance of particularized memory that is held in a sort of solution of nostalgia, so that the act of memory is as evident as the thing remembered, as when James writes of the simple delivery of summer fruit in early nineteenth-century New York:

Why the throb of romance should have beat time for me to such

visions I can scarce explain, or can explain only by the fact that the squalor was a squalor wonderfully mixed and seasoned, and that I should wrong the whole impression if I didn’t figure it first and foremost as that of some vast succulent cornucopia. What did the stacked boxes and baskets of our youth represent but the boundless fruitage of that more bucolic age of the American world, and what was after all of so strong an assault as the rankness of such a harvest? Where is that fruitage now, where in particular are the peaches d’antan? where the mounds of Isabella grapes and Seckel pears in the sticky sweetness of which our childhood seems to have been steeped? It was surely, save perhaps for oranges, a more informally and familiarly fruit-eating time, and bushels of peaches in particular, peaches big and peaches small, peaches white and peaches yellow, played a part in life from which they have somehow been deposed; every garden, almost every bush and the very boys’ pockets grew them.

Such passages surely echo in Moncrieff’s rendering of Proust’s voice

in that most beautiful section of modern prose, the “Place Names: The Place,” which concludes his first volume:

With admiring eyes I saw, luminous and imprisoned in a bowl by

themselves, the agate marbles which seemed precious to me because they were as fair and smiling as little girls, and because they cost fivepence each. Gilberte, who was given a great deal more pocket money than I ever had, asked which I thought the prettiest. They were as transparent, as liquid-seeming as life itself.

There’s no way to quantify such things of course—or, rather, there

are ways, but none of them is convincing, stylometrics seeming about as reliable as lie-detector tests—but, at least to one who has pushed through Proust twice in Moncrieff’s version and once, more laboriously, in French, it can often seem that Moncrieff’s note of winsome gravity is more Jamesian than Proustian.

Gopnick's point seems plausible too me, about the tone, and I admire the way he characterizes Proust -- or Moncrieff's Proust: there is no obvious hierarchy of incidents, anything remembered matters". And, more poetically, his naming that one "winsome gravity."

It is a curious thing though, the substance of the quotes seems to me to me not to support his point. The memory of dwelling of being with a better-monied playmate, coveting treasure is grave and winsome, and so is remembering fruits, now gone. They have substantive similarities. Maybe James's tone is a bit breathless, he's working up his topic

I absolutely loved this book- I think it had an amazing characterization of a textbook narcissist, Amadeo. Below is one of the passages where you get his POV- I loved it, feels very open and honest, and really how a lot of people with faith feel sometimes too.

"His life isn’t supposed to be like this. Good Friday was supposed to save Amadeo. He was supposed to be past the shame and failure and the mistakes that hardly seem to be his own and that unravel beyond his control. Amadeo feels cheated. By Passion Week, by the penitentes, by Jesus himself. The fact is that no one can be crucified every day—not even Jesus could pull off that miracle. Jesus never had to face the long dull aftermath of crucifixion, the daily business of shitting and tooth-cleaning and waking reluctantly to a new day. Jesus never had to watch people return to their own concerns and forget what he did for them. No, instead Jesus died on the cross, and before the women quit weeping outside his tomb, before all those Marys had to deal with grocery shopping and returning to work and paying the bills, Jesus rose from the dead! Oh, he must have felt smug, up there on the cross with that trick up his sleeve. He was spirited away to heaven where he lives in the lap of luxury, looking down on the people with their big endless worshipful party. Because what is Christianity except a never-ending memorial service with people singing his praises and invoking his name until the end of fucking time, just because one day he got three nails and a poke in the ribs? It’s not like Jesus was the only person to ever suffer, Amadeo thinks sourly as he jogs through the Plaza, head down. Hadn’t people died before? Haven’t they died since? And in worse ways, too. How about all the Jews in the Holocaust? How about that guy down in Arizona who used a two-hundred-year-old saguaro cactus for target practice and it fell on him, pinning his torso to the dirt, and he bled and bled, taking ever-shallower breaths, and they say he wasn’t even dead when the vultures and coyotes starting taking away pieces of him. That guy definitely had Jesus beat for suffering. In fact, now that he thinks of it, what Jesus went through barely even counts as suffering when he knew all along he had good things coming down the pike. Daddy would bail him out, sweep him up to heaven and seat him at his right hand. Real suffering isn’t just about physical pain, but about not knowing when the pain will end, not knowing what the point of it all is."

You can write about anything you like in "fours and nines" threads, but today's theme, part of my plan to exercise the dominion of the catalog over the canon, is Physical Grace. I was thinking of physical handicap, of which examples come readier to mind, and will get to that, but thought it would be nice to vary dark and light, up and down.

So What are you reading? What is anything you'd like to talk about w/r/t literature? And especially, can you recall any instances of physical grace in works you've read?

Hi, new subscribers; and sorry for my long neglect, old subscribers.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to make the sub more interesting, and attract more readers & contributors. And also hoping to find kindred souls who see my plans as a viable idea for a valuable sub.

Quick sub history: in 2016 this sub took off and was active for about 18 months. Then I got 1) a burdensome job and 2) spent all my time reading Ulysses for a couple years, did a stint modding a busier sub, and I let the canonade languish.

Now I'm hoping to be a catalysty converter and convert you all into contributors and revitalize canonade. For those of you who aren't clear on what the sub is about in the first place, I put some notes at end, "why another lit sub"

My plans

Here's what I have in mind, the point of this post is to get suggestions for other types of stuff to try.

• Fours and nines

I've resisted the idea of a "what are you reading" periodic post because -- there are so many good ones already -- r/truelit, r/literature, r/bookclub, all have fine lists, and of course r/books is a firehose. I don't think reddit needs another one. But, periodic posts like that are definitely community-building. I'm experimenting with regular post (flaired "fours_and_nines" because I post the on days that end with 4 and 9). For now, I'm taking some common theme/situation (jealousy, mentorship, rediscovered pleasure of place, homecoming, being a victim, being a victimizer, mourning, rumour, infatuation, gluttony and the six other damning sins and related redeeming virtues) and inviting write about passages that come to mind -- whether from what they're reading now or better yet that they remember from any book.

• taxonomy posts

I'm planning to automate some stuff to try to make the sub's previous posts more "discoverable." Reddit pushes old content out of the way pretty fast, but substantive posts about the kind of stuff we talk about will be as fresh in a decade or lifetime as they are today. So I want to figure a way of tagging topics, I'm just playing with it now (the account a-kind-of-taxonomy). What I want to do is auto reply with a tags post, or make a web UI for that, and try to and have a script that autoprocesses replies with some notation like "+ sibling" to add that as a tag.

• pros on prose

I'm going to start posting nice paragraphs I see by "real" critics, and anyone else can too. I don't want it to drive out OC, and if it does I'll limit it.

• Ads

I'm experimenting to see if ads bring any useful posting - it worked in 2016 when ads were free, now I have to pay and it's expensive.

If anyone has ideas for ads, let me know -- Images have to be 1200x628px (that go in people's feeds) and 400x300px. Here's an example of an ad that worked well in 2016. And in the wiki I collect potential "advertising" slogans- https://www.reddit.com/r/canonade/wiki/slogans

• twitter

I am going to start tweeting mentions of witty/interesting posts + comments at https://twitter.com/canonadian - please retweet. Also share twitter accounts with me you think are worth following for literary gems.

Why another lit sub?

In most book subs people make generalizations about books and authors ("Thomas Bernhard is the most trenchant...."; "East of Eden completely floored me"). As a reader I find interesting stuff in those generalizations, and they point me to more good stuff than I'll ever be able to read and remind me of books I should re-read.

But not much gets said about nitty-gritty of writing, the kind of stuff James Woods writes about in "How Fiction Works" for example. Or Jenny Davidson in "A Life in Sentences." Those commentators write interestingly about how effective writing does its thing, and I think we can learn from them -- and each other, which is where this sub comes in -- how to think more interesting thoughts about what we read.

So this sub is place where everyone is encouraged to write about narrative (and poetry, and expository writing) -- but to write about specific passages, not overall impressions -- so the catch phrase "a bookish subs where books are off-topic."

Also, if you're interested in writing but this isn't quite the angle you have in mind, check out r/extraordinary_tales and r/bookreviewers in addition to the big book subs.

Also much as it is okay when an elected official uses his office to drive government business to his properties, it is okay for me to point you to other subs I'm involved in -- in r/usages is the word-level version of this sub and r/ebookdeals I post a lot of literary fiction that's on sale for between $1-$5 US

From Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

The setup: 1953, a tiny "off the roads" farming village in the Soviet Union. The home of Magda's family. Magda is Emil's fiancée, both are 20-something Muscovites.

Emil deboards a train some miles away and has to walk some hours thru fields to reach the. He is covered in a strange floury dust that rises from the earth. On his arrival a small crowd, unsure of whether to be awed or scornful of the city slicker, gawks at him. Finally his grandfather-in-law-to-be breaks into wheezy laughter: 'He'm covered in shit! Magda's boy covered in shit!"

Emil doesn't fit in -- the suspicion and resentment of the villagers to any urbanite are quickly depicted, and the readers squirms at Emil's halting attempts to make himself welcome to his prospective in-laws.

Drink will ease the tension, eh?

Here is Francis Spufford; my obs in comments.

‘Mister, welcome, you’re most welcome,’ said Magda’s mother, who had evidently rehearsed her line and needed to say it. ‘Welcome to the house and welcome to the family. Won’t you come in and take a little drink.’

‘It’s a pleasure to meet to you. Please, call me Emil,’ said Emil, and they stood aside and let him in. Inside, the house was a clutter of shadows, slowly resolving into wooden furniture and objects dangling from low rafters. Also, he couldn’t help noticing, the house smelled, with the strong odours of humans living close together, laid down in layers over time and engrained in the woodwork, he guessed, to the point that you’d probably have to burn the place down altogether to dislodge the laminated fug of sweat and smoke and human waste. That blur of painted glass and tin plate over there must be an icon, the first Emil had ever seen that wasn’t in a museum. Other figures crowded through the door, blocking off the light: Magda, her father, the old man, the fellow who’d slapped him. His eyes were still adjusting. Magda’s mother seated him at the table and in front of him put a jamjar two-thirds filled with something clear. The men sat down opposite, a grimly nervous tribunal.

‘My father you’ve met,’ said Magda. ‘My grandfather; my big brother Sasha.’

They got jars too. Emil sniffed his, trying not to be noticed. It wasn’t water.

‘Homebrew,’ Magda muttered in his ear. ‘A social necessity. Drink up.’

Emil tipped a mouthful into himself, cautiously. The caution was pointless: a tide of alcoholic fire flowed in across his tongue, hit his uvula with a splash and burned its way down his throat. After the burn came a fiercely warm afterglow, in which it became possible to taste what he’d just swallowed. It was faintly soapy, faintly stale. However they made it, the homebrew must be getting on for pure alcohol, much stronger than bottled vodka.

‘Good stuff,’ he said, and was pleased to find his voice was steady, not comically scorched. ‘A toast,’ he said, and held up the jamjar. ‘To journey’s end and new beginnings.’ To himself, he sounded plainly fake; as theatrical as some perfect-vowelled stage actor hamming the part of the son—in—law from the metropolis. But they seemed to like it. They nodded, and gulped gravely at their jars. He gulped again too, and while he was recovering from the tide of fire, Magda’s mother deftly topped him up from an ancient jerrycan, which was not what he’d had in mind. A tin plate of sunflower seeds appeared. Magda was hovering behind him somewhere. He could feel her ironic gaze on his neck

‘To marriage, then,’ said Magda’s father. Swig.

‘Yeah, to the bride and groom,’ said Sasha. Swig. Come on, this is better, thought Emil, this is going to be OK.

‘To Christ and his saints,’ said her grandfather. Silence.

‘Grandad here is getting a bit confused,’ offered Magda’s mother.

‘Soft in the head,’ agreed Sasha, grinning with fury behind his teeth, and lifted a hand.

‘I don’t mind drinking to that,’ Emil said hastily. ‘It’s what my grandfather says,’ he said, though it wasn’t, his grandfather having been brought up, long ago, as a good Kazan Muslim Swig. Wary eyes everywhere.

‘I told you,’ said Magda from the shadows. ‘Emil is all right.’

‘I hope I am,’ he said, a little approximately. He was feeling the firewater. Various things inside him seemed to be coming unscrewed, desocketed. ‘I hope I’ll be able to do you some good, you know, now that I’m in the family.’

‘How’s that?’ said Magda’s father.

‘Tell them where your job’s going to be,’ said Magda.

‘Well ...’ he said. It had seemed much less certain a thing to boast about, since he arrived in the village; but she was insistent.

‘Go on, tell them’

‘Well, come September, I’ll be working for, for’ — no need to get into the detail of the bureaucracy— ‘the Central Committee.’

‘What,’ said her father slowly, ‘like, at the district office?’

‘Er, no —’ began Emil, but Magda interrupted.

‘He means the Central Committee. Of the Soviet Union.’

Silence. Magda’s dad looked at him as if he had just lost whatever comprehensibility he might ever have had; as if he had just been transformed into some dangerous mythological creature, right there at the table. But Sasha gave a long, low whistle.

‘Don’t you get it?’ he said to his father. ‘We’re going to have a friend up top. Right up top.’

‘Family,’ corrected Magda.

Almost all plot-driven fiction involves conflict of one type or another, and the way its resolved or left hanging, how it relates to other themes in the book, is often characteristic of the work's nature, or helps establish that.

Let's have an inventory of a few conflicts you can remember from things you've read -- fiction or not.

What kind of thing, or what specific book, are you looking to read next & are you reading anything now you're eager to finish or don't want to end? Use this thread for any thoughts about reading, or about this subs, or about book-related subs in general.

/r/bookclub is having a guess-the-quote contest at https://www.reddit.com/r/bookclub/comments/uejqib/, some of youse might be interested in, or even (I hope) draw inspiration for a post here. Also, if you're looking for examples of ways to talk about literature, I've started a booklist at openlibrary with books about books, many of which can be read online there. Suggestions requested.