Clarice Lispector wrote, 'Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?'

Duras - cold blue truths

John Updike in 1960, pastel and digital, after a photo by Alfred Knopf. Knopf took the photo after cutting some objectionable passages from Rabbit, Run. 'I think what Alfred captured at that moment was the relaxed visage of a man who has decided to sell out,' Updike wrote later.

Absolutely in awe of this review by Lisa Borst, which manages to be 100% authoritative and deliriously fun and entertaining at the same time. This should be impossible! But it turns out it isn't. The treatment that Nicholson Baker deserves. bookforum.com/print/3004/nic…

“Little Eyolf” is among Ibsen’s finest plays, & I don’t think it could be done better than in this 1982 BBC production.

Ibsen's 'Little Eyolf' 1982 Anthony Hopkins, Diana Rigg, Peggy Ashcroft,... youtu.be/V8v2Qgfv-Zw?si… via YouTube

A landmark new anthology of Bengali literature in English, this brilliant book brings together a century's worth of extraordinary stories.

Now available at Walking BookFairs. Come by for your copies.

This book joins its illustrious cousins today, 28 March, in UK bookstores Penguin Books UK. UK friends, please send photos if you spot it?

Ellen Bass from her collection Indigo

Tom Snarsky Marie Howe’s “What Belongs to Us” (1983)

Late days
I want to drive to your grave,
But I don’t belong to it.

nothing without us

Larry Levis, from ‘Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It’

Jill Osier

“=The adult world—a place where they, too, will be slashed by forces that are irreducibly bigger & stronger; where they will be left to crash from tree to tree.' A close & illuminating read of #WillaCather , her durable rewards, by Corey Sobel Literary Hub. lithub.com/i-wont-kill-it…

this is a spare, beautifully written memoirist novel. when John Updike visited me -- just one time--I showed him my shelf of Updike books & John was most surprised/ touched/ pleased to see his mother's novel there. clearly it meant more to him than the sight of his own books.

Jane Hirshfield • The Asking

JH has been elemental in my grief — her poetry asks we hold opposing ideas (as analysis does) to not foreclose, to think in terms of both/and,to be curious of life’s unfolding • knowing the capacity to hold grief can heighten joy and vice versa

After MRS. DALLOWAY and before TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, Virginia Woolf wrote her first essay for The Yale Review. Nine more followed. We’ve made them all available online for the first time: yalereview.org/from-the-archi…

From A Mind for Metaphors
By Ann Townsend

A perfect text (Agnes Martin)

This poem by Vasko Popa translated by Simic just blew my mind in a thousand pieces.

Orphan Absence

Built like an empty gorge
You smell of absence
Alone you gave birth to yourself

Taught, today, this astonishing sonnet by Hopkins, part of the six so-called “Terrible Sonnets” he wrote during his deep depression of the 1880s (one of them gave me the title of my first book).
Such a poem.
Interested in glosses of lines 5-8; how even to make bare sense of them?