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Mikhail Iossel is having black tea and an almond croissant in a downtown shopping mall when a middle-aged man plunks himself down directly opposite Iossel at the otherwise empty long table. A life story in a sentence.
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Brian Fawcett on the importance of clear instructions, the use of “hogwash,” and the art of playing ping pong in Ch. 9 of “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
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More passages from Vian Andrews’ journals of living in Italy’s Umbrian countryside, a world of mountain hamlets, memories of dancing around the fire pit, old knife-grinders, and burnng the cuttings.
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Seven-year-old Mikhail Iossel is writing out the alphabet in a Soviet communal apartment. Clean writing in a sentence.
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“Painting isn’t dead. The novel isn’t dead. They just aren’t as central to the culture as they once were,” says David Shields in “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.” In an era where we need books for people who find television too slow, where does writing go from here?
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An 18-year-old Canadian with writerly ambitions, working on his uncle and aunt’s Sussex pig farm, gets to meet the butler of famed English literary critic, Cyril Connelly. Ch. 8 of “The Sussex Variations, or Two Boars.”
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In 1983 Leningrad, at an underground art exhibition, Mikhail Iossel meets a German man who tells Iossel how he survived the Nazi era. A story in a burning sentence.
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Brian Fawcett gets to a pig farm in Sussex, England the long way around. He goes through a brain glitch, the Visigoths’ sack of Rome, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the British Museum Reading Room. Ch. 7 of The Sussex Variations traverses the History of the Knowable World.
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More passages from Vian Andrews’ journals about life in Italy’s Umbrian countryside. He’s thinking about books, silence, pruning tools, theatres, Bob Dylan, and the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban.
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Mikhail Iossel pauses in a Montreal metro underpass to listen to a busking middle-aged violinist playing Shostakovich’s “Waltz No. 2.” It’s a melody that can fit into a sentence.
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