Author: Julian BarnesTitle: Departure(s)Year: 2026Genre: Literary fictionForm: A late novel / elegiac fictionRating: ★★★★★ What It Is Departure(s) is Julian Barnes’s declared final book: a brief, formally elusive work that moves between fiction, memoir, literary essay and autobiography while refusing to settle comfortably into any one of them. Barnes’s own website describes it as fictionContinue reading “The Beginning of the End of the Story: Departure(s) — Review”
Category Archives: Blog
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World
Director: Sasha WatersTitle: Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the WorldYear: 2026Country: United StatesGenre: Documentary / BiographyRunning time: 91 minutesRating: ★★★★☆ What It Is Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World is Sasha Waters’s documentary portrait of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Mary Oliver, whose deceptively simple poems about nature, solitude, mortality,Continue reading “Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World”
The Human Condition According to Tolstoy
By Bergotte Leo Tolstoy is the writer who makes other great writers feel provincial. Not because his books are the longest, though two of them are among the longest ever written, and not because his range is the widest, though it extends from the ballrooms of Moscow to the battlefields of Austerlitz to the peasantContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Tolstoy”
Letter From The Editor #9
Things have changed around here. As of this week, there will be much more structure to our posts. I’ve always likened this website to a kind of open notebook, but even open notebooks need a spine — so from now on, each day will have its own focus, giving you something to look forward toContinue reading “Letter From The Editor #9”
Issey Miyake
Encounters · No. 6 A Piece of Cloth Issey Miyake survived the atomic bomb at seven years old and spent the rest of his life making clothes that felt like freedom. These two facts are not unrelated. By Bergotte On the morning of August 6, 1945, Issey Miyake was seven years old and standing closeContinue reading “Issey Miyake”
Outline by Rachel Cusk — Review
Author: Rachel CuskTitle: OutlineFirst published: 2014Genre: Literary fictionLength: approximately 250 pages (256 pages in the Picador paperback edition)Series: Outline Trilogy, Book OneRating: ★★☆☆☆ What It Is Rachel Cusk’s Outline is a novel constructed largely through ten conversations. Its narrator, Faye, is a writer who travels to Athens to teach a summer creative-writing course. During herContinue reading “Outline by Rachel Cusk — Review”
Affordable Style: Inns and Guesthouses of the Austrian Alps
The Austrian Alps may be known for glamorous ski resorts like Kitzbühel or Lech, but the heart of Alpine hospitality lies in its Gasthäuser, chalets, and small family inns. Here, rustic timber architecture, balconies overflowing with geraniums, and hearty mountain cooking come together in stays that are warm, authentic — and affordable. Affordable style inContinue reading “Affordable Style: Inns and Guesthouses of the Austrian Alps”
The Play Hiding Inside a Cocktail Party: T.S. Eliot’s Strangest Success
What This Play Is The Cocktail Party is a verse drama by T.S. Eliot, first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949 before transferring to the West End and Broadway, where it won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play. By the time he wrote it, Eliot was already the most famous poet writing inContinue reading “The Play Hiding Inside a Cocktail Party: T.S. Eliot’s Strangest Success”
We Are All the Monster: Frankenstein, Late Capitalism, and the Things We Made and Left to Die
Mary Shelley was nineteen years old when she wrote the defining myth of the modern world. She probably did not know she was doing this. Two hundred years later, the novel she produced in a wet summer beside a Swiss lake reads less like a Gothic romance than like a diagnosis — precise, unflinching, andContinue reading “We Are All the Monster: Frankenstein, Late Capitalism, and the Things We Made and Left to Die”
Anne Sexton
Essay · Poetry & Lives The Woman Who Made Death Speak in Stanzas Anne Sexton wrote about madness, abortion, adultery, menstruation, incest, and suicide with a directness that the literary establishment of the late 1950s had agreed, without quite stating it aloud, was not available to women. She made it available. The cost was everythingContinue reading “Anne Sexton”
My World of Interiors 