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From Stephen Elliott
Forget magazines—for a small subscription fee, Melville House will send you two novellas every month in whatever format you prefer.
It’s the perfect way to finally get around to reading classics like Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart and Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
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Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories illustrates the haphazard, psychological violence of a century of ideology, disruption, and the search for the meaning of personal freedom.
Like Proust, David Mitchell examines how the incidents of a person’s life fit together, how the different parts of the world come to form one world.
Elif Batuman offers a rogue’s gallery of Russian writers, scholars, and literary characters—the only oddball missing is herself.A few weeks ago, I went to a dermatologist to have something on my nose removed. He said less than two sentences to me, asked me one question he didn’t listen to the answer to, ignored my protests, had a nurse hold me down, stuck a large needle in my nose with no warning, and then dug the thing out with a scalpel even though the anesthesia was barely working.
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An anthology of stories from the new Russia shows the continuity between contemporary writers and their canonical predecessors
Roberto Bolaño’s überbook inspires a speed-read through literary history.