Last week’s New Yorker magazine included a series of letters written by Saul Bellow to other writers. I’ve often thought epistolary exchange between writers to be the most nettly of writing, both the most effusive and the most sincere, the most pretentious and the most vein-splittingly self-conscious. It’s hard

I’ve been wanting to read James Hanley to you for a couple of months now, ever since he was reintroduced to me a few months ago while I was yearning for a bathematic submergence in a foreign hotel.

I read recently about toxic bread in a sleepy French village, about mass hallucinations and the newly revealed hypothesis that the CIA was responsible for covert LSD experiments. Apparently, the same thing might have happened in the subways of New York. And suddenly, so much is explained, especially as pertains to cockroach-squashing memories. These days, [...]

I have a good excuse to spare you my blathery scrawl about the show-stopping beauty in this story — the hot cats at Electric Literature have done so in a flashier way, and before you even tap the PLAY button on your baubly mp3 players, you ought to watch this:

Sometimes I think you haven’t lived until you’ve been given the shoulder by a drunken horse in a bar. Other times I think the very stuff of life happens from being the drunken horse in a bar. But usually, it has to do with neither of these things, and I’m fairly certain that none of it would be worth the slightest damn if there was no Queneau to neigh by.

The other day I was walking through a blistering, blustery, blinding-white below-zero snowstorm, cursing the day I decided not to live on a Caribbean island, and doubly cursing the day I decided not to be born with antifreeze for blood. Because if I had been born with antifreeze for blood, I’d probably have other alien characteristics as well, such as the ability to launch an anvil from my hand that I could drop on the head of the person walking in the snowstorm next to me when that person proclaimed: “at last! This is what January is SUPPOSED to be like.”

So, I know very little about the author of tonight’s story. He has no Wikipedia page in any language that I can gather, one used copy of an out-of-print collection of stories available in English (that I can cursorily find, anyhow), and a slight dusting of a presence in literary anthologies, including one in which I dusted off this. In fact, the only thing I’m certain of regarding tonight’s author is that I really ought to attempt to learn basic Greek pronunciation if I’m going to crack at anything like this again.

Oh, aren’t we lucky!? A double-bluffed, double-dipped, double-headed dose of Isaac Babel. When you’ve had a listen here and discover that you’re still running low on your recommended daily serving of Babel, you might head here to find a new recording of an old reading of another one.

I can think of nothing more apt for the rounding-out of a year than a fleeting little fable on outplaying inevitability. If you’re anything like me, Inevitability is one collector you’ve managed to send off-course at least once this year, and that itself is cause for champagne. Happy New Decade to all, but especially to those who continue to believe relentlessly in the potential of literature.

There was a time when I was little (and I was so cute, and so little!) when I wanted to be Jane Bowles. I was obsessed with the puppet show, unhealthily so, though thinking back now, I can’t think of any self-respecting adult who’d have introduced such a cute little thing to it.