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Knausgaard’s Mephistopheles
Back in college, one of my literature professors once remarked that the first hundred pages of a Balzac novel are often boring, but the ones that follow are the most gripping you have ever read in your life...
Sleeping Through Life
Two chapters into Matthew Gasda’s The Sleepers, Mariko, a waitress and stage actress, gets into a spat with her boyfriend, Dan, a Marxist English professor and would-be public intellectual...
A Cloak of Fiction
Either/Or by Elif Batuman penguin, 368 pages, $27 Flannery O’Connor argued that the separation of matter and spirit, nature and grace, was fatal to the art of fiction, which...
