Originally published in 2019 by Vintage, Great Britain, as Serious noticing: selected essays "These essays originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The New Yorker, London Review of Books, and The New Republic"--Title page verso
Contents:
Fun stuff: homage to Keith Moon What Chekhov meant by life Serious noticing Saul Bellow's comic style Anna Karenina and characterization Joseph Roth's empire of signs Paul Auster's shallowness Hysterical realism Bohumil Hrabal's comic world George Orwell's very English revolution Jane Austen's heroic consciousness Cormac McCarthy's the road Reality examined to the point of madness': László Krasznahorkai Wounder and wounded On not going home Other side of silence: rereading W. G. Sebald Becoming them Don Quixote's old and new testaments Dostoevsky's god Helen Garner's savage honesty All and the if: God and metaphor in Melville Elena Ferrante Virginia Woolf's Mysticism Job existed: Primo Levi Marilynne Robinson Ismail Kadare Jenny Erpenbeck Packing my father-in-law's library
