Modern Library Revue: #80 Brideshead Revisited

Lydia Kiesling - 3.5.2010 | 11

The people in Brideshead Revisited are also Catholic with their affections, but for them it means something different, namely that they are crazy.

Lydia Kiesling - 3.5.2010 | 11

● ● ●

Reviews

Proust’s Arabesk: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

Lydia Kiesling - 1.29.2010 | 15

For all that Orhan Pamuk the citizen has been embroiled in legal struggles with the Turkish state, he strikes me in one sense as an elemental patriot. To chronicle something obsessively is a form of love, and Pamuk documents the details of his Istanbul obsessively.

Lydia Kiesling - 1.29.2010 | 15

● ● ●

Modern Library Revue

Modern Library Revue: #72 A House for Mr. Biswas

Lydia Kiesling - 1.20.2010 | 4

I don't tend to condemn books solely because the writer was some variety of wretch. But I have done so if I think it will create a smoke-screen for the fact that I did not understand the book.

Lydia Kiesling - 1.20.2010 | 4

● ● ●

Reviews

The Berlin Stories: A Book for Year’s End

Lydia Kiesling - 12.31.2009 | 3

The Berlin Stories is two short novels, published separately in the 1930s. It was an inspired pairing. Together they flesh out the world Isherwood describes: Berlin of the very early 1930s, imperfect in the extreme, but a paradise for Isherwood's hitherto uneven talent.

Lydia Kiesling - 12.31.2009 | 3

● ● ●

Modern Library Revue

Modern Library Revue: #17 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Lydia Kiesling - 12.21.2009 | 4

Carson McCullers attains a level of virtuosity on many fronts, but I was most taken with her depiction of relationships, many of which balance on a knife edge of propriety, wavering back and forth between the lovely and the weird and the outright perverse.

Lydia Kiesling - 12.21.2009 | 4

● ● ●

Curiosities

Best Last Lines

Lydia Kiesling - 12.8.2009 | 1

Modern Library Revue

Modern Library Revue: #42 Deliverance

Lydia Kiesling - 11.25.2009 | 14

Sometimes I was (very marginally) enjoying it and sometimes I was thinking that if I must read about scary, disgusting things I'd rather get my copy of The Stand out from under the bed and at least have a good time.

Lydia Kiesling - 11.25.2009 | 14

● ● ●

Curiosities

Bad Sex in Fiction

Lydia Kiesling - 11.20.2009

Curiosities

They Really Get Me

Lydia Kiesling - 11.12.2009

Screening Room

One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: A Review

Lydia Kiesling - 11.6.2009 | 5

The promise of this foul enterprise lurked in every high school year book page, in every reference to the mad ones and the roman candles and the burning sensation.

Lydia Kiesling - 11.6.2009 | 5

● ● ●

Curiosities