It’s been nearly a decade since my favorite undergraduate philosophy professor introduced me to Owen Flanagan. Flanagan is part of a vibrant but relatively new philosophical niche: naturalized ethics. The field plumbs the depths of philosophical history, plucks out tidbits that harmonize with modern findings about the capabilities and constraints of the embodied mind and […]
“You could see anything in the rain. The individual drops became streaks with the slowness of the eye; they merged and re-emerged as ciphers for the shapes you carried inside you; they lasted less than a heartbeat in your sight and they went on forever. He saw a chair, and a ship that was not […]
“She’d talk to him about her old loves and old hopes and new hopes and he half listened, knowing she thought he didn’t really understand what she was saying. When he talked it was in another language, and the story was even less believeable. The woman would lie close to him, her head on his […]
“Just once, he thought, I’d like to know whose side I’m really on in something like this. Here I am, in this absurd fortress, packed with riches, crammed with concentrated nobility––such as it was, he thought, watching Keiver’s vacant-looking eyes––facing out the hordes beyond (all claw and tackle, brute force and brute intelligence) trying to […]
Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle is one of the weirdest books I’ve ever read; I don’t quite know what to make of it. This is my first Jackson novel, and it’s clear that she is a talented writer. I did not, however, find myself satisfied by this particular story. We Have […]
“All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth the my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.” ––We Have […]
“I wished they were dead. I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and […]
“The story we are told of women is not this one. The story of women is the story of love, of foundering into another. A slight deviation: longing to founder and being unable to. Being left alone in the foundering, and taking things into one’s own hands: rat poison, the wheels of a Russian train. […]
“In February, the door of his English class opened and a toad in a red cape walked in. Grublike face. Pasty sheen, sparse hair. A round of snickers. The little man swirled the cape off his shoulders, wrote Denton Thrasher on the chalkboard. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them, his face was […]
Two hundred or so pages in, I had high hopes for David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. The novel grabbed me right from the start, showing all the signs of another brilliant yarn from one of the UK’s most talented living authors. Mitchell has a unique gift for inhabiting the minds of different narrators, and for […]