Nicholas Rombes: One Perfect Sentence #9

“What, what exactly have we done here?” asked Lynn Jackson, her heavy dreadlocks falling like curtains over her tasteful kente cloth blouse, which did not hide but rather emphasized her heavy, yet stately, if not regal, countenance.

The van was a way to navigate through my grief. I imagined I was driving away from pain but in fact it filled the four corners of my vehicle. I drove the long way to LA, through the South and along the Mexican border.

During dark times, we are drawn to dark books. Threats of chaos and futility skyrocket sales of nihilistic fictions like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

As Smith sang the words, she appeared a disused vessel, ruined by the trauma of modernity. Her eyes were in a squint, her collar, a prairie preacher’s, was plain.

Blind Spot smashes multiple genres into a single space, blending and fusing romance, thriller and existentialist novel into a hybrid entity. Its form tests the notion that ​there is a singular aspect to the world.

I was in my early twenties when my aunt handed me a VHS cassette with my mother’s name written on the label. My aunt and mom worked at a school for hearing-impaired children in Oslo, Norway, and at some point in the 1980s the school introduced video technology

A few months after the end of the United States’ bicentennial year, and an unassuming, unpublished junior professor from Wordsworth and Southey College in bucolic Susquehanna, Pennsylvania found himself at the center of a media firestorm that was jocularly called “Miltongate.”

Mothers don’t eat. It had come to my attention that mothers were fueled by something other than food: possibly telephone talk and worry. I wondered how old you had to be to turn into a mother and not have to eat anymore.

Reading Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men made me realize magical realism could play a complex role in fiction, that it could be utilized as another literary tool in an author’s craft.

What many literary critics overlook, however, is the fact that the schlemiel has also found its way into the pages of great Anglo-American writers like John Updike (see his “Beck” series) and Thomas Pynchon.

by Stuart Elden The One King Lear, by Brian Vickers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 416 pp. Anyone who has seen more than one production of a Shakespeare play in a theatre, or watched a film version, will know that the words said by the actors can change. Speeches are...

I had been living in Scotland for more than five years before I found The Living Mountain through two recommendations that came in quick succession.

And I am sitting in my new room, with curtains, fire, table; and two great views; sometimes sun over the brooks and storm over the church.

A week or so back I found with some difficulty a friend who even in his own judgment has no claim to the vacant office, and we set out together across Dartmoor

I was forcefully discouraged from reading by parents and teachers, because I was not reading the “right” things, and furthermore was not reading them in the “right” way.

Did the world already end? Did we miss the moment of our own expiration? That seems to be the question we are collectively asking ourselves at this moment through the medium of popular culture.

If Beckett’s “changing tense” was postmodernism’s last gasp then perhaps it first spluttered into life with the culmination of his great aesthetic transition.