Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them. — Rainer Maria Rilke
From her mysterious “found” stories to new versions of Proust and Flaubert, the American writer and translator Lydia Davis is surprising and memorable. I find it hard to describe exactly what Lydia Davis’s writing is like. Some of her shorter . . .
When I was a student at University of Toronto, I wrote book reviews for the Varsity, one of the university newspapers. After seeing my review of Solomon Gursky Was Here, Penguin Books called to ask if I wanted . . .
History
Bow-hunting season is over; now the muzzle-loaders are out. This morning I asked my neighbour if I’d be safe walking in the hills. He looked at my jacket and said, I wouldn’t wear leather. Good point, I said. Or . . .
Ramanujan is a mathematician whose story occupies the mythic space between extremes—faith and rationale, intuition and proof, tradition and modernity. Even now, almost ninety years since his brief life ended, much of the scrawl of theorems and dreams in his . . .
