Biblioklept

2 min read 2022-01-04 03:24:17

My entry in The Comics Journal’s “Best Comics of 2021” article

The Comics Journal’s lengthy write up of “The Best Comics of 2021” is up. Here’s my entry: When I was a kid one of the greatest small joys

1 min read 2022-01-03 21:18:11

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (the great-granduncle of American novelist Thomas Ruggles Pynchon) writes to the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne.

1 min read 2022-01-01 08:29:37

☉ indicates a reread. ☆ indicates an outstanding read. The Real Cool Killers, Chester Himes ☆ The Bachelors, Muriel Spark Bina, Anakana

10 min read 2021-12-25 12:01:19

“Mamsell Fredrika” by Selma Lagerlöf translated by Pauline Bancroft Flach It was Christmas night, a real Christmas night. The goblins raised

2 min read 2021-12-23 09:26:13

Of course there were millions and millions of books that I left unread in 2021, but here are a few I hope to carve a space for sometime in the next

2 min read 2021-12-20 06:19:33

Cormac McCarthy’s seminal anti-Western Blood Meridian isn’t exactly known for visions of peace on earth and good will to man. Still, there’s

6 min read 2021-12-17 06:50:21

A selection from Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan (1912) by Clement A. Miles The names given to the feast by different

16 min read 2021-12-14 06:45:06

“A Man and Some Others” by Stephen Crane I Dark mesquit spread from horizon to horizon. There was no house or horseman from which a mind could

1 min read 2021-12-13 03:33:16

I’ve been casually looking for a copy of John Berryman’s 1950 biography of Stephen Crane for a few years now. Berryman is one of my favorite

5 min read 2021-12-08 08:57:55

I read Italo Calvino’s posthumous collection Under the Jaguar Sun over the past three days (in William Weaver’s 1988 translation). When I

1 min read 2021-12-07 08:02:12

NYRB is reprinting the last novel of Elizabeth Taylor (not that one, the other one), Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. NYRB’s blurb: On a rainy

2 min read 2021-12-05 05:44:57

W.C. Williams anecdote meeting T.S. Eliot by Allen Ginsberg as told to Bockris-Wylie Note: This isn’t an article deliberately written nor an

1 min read 2021-12-02 23:30:46

Illustration for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, 1922 by John Archibald Austen (1886-1948)

18 min read 2021-12-01 07:15:44

“The Five White Mice” by Stephen Crane Freddie was mixing a cocktail. His hand with the long spoon was whirling swiftly, and the ice in the

1 min read 2021-11-26 23:19:09

From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Notebooks— TURKEY REMAINS AND HOW TO INTER THEM WITH NUMEROUS SCARCE RECIPES At this post holiday season the