Holiday Cheer from Eduard von Hartmann

Combining Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Mill, he gives us the best-case scenario: The second condition of the possibility of victory is that the consciousness of mankind be penetrated by the folly of volition and the misery ...

John Williams: Stoner

Whatever my reservations about the New York Review of Books, if it subsidizes reissues of things like this, I pardon its sins. Extra points for choosing such an apt cover painting to implicitly portray its ...

Walser on Kleist

A different side of Walser altogether: What he writes makes him grimace: his creations miscarry. Toward autumn he is taken ill. He is amazed at the gentleness which now comes over him. His sister travels ...

Thomas Bernhard: Extinction

2.2.4 Place-Names: The Place: Albertine

I don’t have a great deal to say about the girls of Within a Budding Grove. Young Marcel’s impressions of them have as much to do with what he is looking for at that point ...

1.3.1 Swann in Love: Images

Paris, years earlier, as Marcel (the narrator and the author are nearly undifferentiable in this section) recounts the story of Swann’s unpleasant affair with Odette, a not-terribly-deep woman who is as incapable of returning his ...

The Return of Philip Latinowicz, Miroslav Krleza