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In Which I Discover Shirley Jackson Is Brilliant!
If anyone is interested Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle is available on Kindle today for only 99p, and I urge anyone who has never read it to remedy the situation immediately. I know this sounds odd – after all, I read Jackson’s short story The Lottery and hated it so much…
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Sunday Snippets: Star Maps
I always say I’m a bit of a bookish magpie, stealing ideas from other people when they catch my fancy, and I came across this ages ago, thanks to Pam at Travellin’ Penguin, and filed it away in my brain for future use, where it rattled around for several months until the other day, when I…
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The Street (but not the TV show!)
Today’s book is The Street, by Ann Petry, chosen because it is set in Harlem, just like The Constant Sinner, and makes an interesting companion piece. As you might expect, some of the themes are very similar: there is crime, prostitution, even murder. But there the similarity ends for this novel, written in 1945 and…
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In Which I Find A Virago I Hate
Mother and Son, by Ivy Compton-Burnett was bought at the same time as Mae West’s The Constant Sinner, and bears out my theory that you should never make assumptions about books. I bought the West book out of curiosity and, against all expectation, thoroughly enjoyed it. On the other hand I had high hopes for…
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Mae West and The Constant Sinner
Babe Gordon leaned against the crumbling red brick wall of the Marathon Athletic Club in Harlem, at 135th Street off Fifth Avenue, and pulled at a cigarette. The Saturday night fight crowd picked its way under the glaring arc lamp in front of the main entrance like a slow-moving blackbeetle. Babe scanned the humans with…
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The Book Trunk 