Given Flaubert’s obsession with style and craft, any translation of Madame Bovary into English requires not merely competence but a touch of full-on windmill-charging madness.  Lydia Davis has this madness, tempered by a Flaubertian fastidiousness and dedication to language.  The results are exhilarating.

Nabokov’s best writing will last long after The Original of Laura is properly forgotten.

From Poe to Kafka, from Melville to W. G. Sebald, alienation and the uncanny have usually come to us with a chill, a coldness that questions not only the nature of human relationships but even the possibility of them.