During sobremesa, plates are cleared, sweet treats are set, drinks are replenished, and digestifs are brought out serving as fuel for conversations, ranging from lighthearted to deep and emotional. The chatter often lasts longer than the meal and eases into the next activity or preludes bedtime, depending on the dining time.
Feelings of joy, conviviality, pleasure, and affection emanate across the table, turning the necessity of eating into something much more enjoyable.
When it’s really working, the short story is, word-for-word, the most satisfying of the literary genres. A successful short story has all the punch of a great lyric poem, with the narrative frisson we associate with a good novel. Happily for readers, Kelly Sather’s Small in Real Life, winner of the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, offers up nine strong stories, each one a little miracle of compression and surprise.
Forsyth is an assured writer who knows her stuff when it comes to myth, a storyteller who can draw the reader in with quiet confidence. The outsider coming to power; the thrill of a magical assist; the familiar rhythm of being taken on a journey that leads you there and back again – it’s an alluring opportunity to leave behind the worries of reality for a while. But you may find simple comfort isn’t enough.
Shrewdly framed by Ricks’s introduction and notes, On the Novel and Journalism proves unexpectedly heartening: the much-maligned Victorians offer good company; we need not feel we are alone in our present “culture wars.” Setting Stephen down, I even imagined that 150 years hence someone might read a collection of the writings of some protagonist of our own ill-tempered debates and conclude that we had a great deal more in common than we supposed.
Relax: you’re probably not making as many mistakes as you think you are. So says eminent linguist Geoffrey Pullum’s breezy guide to grammar – or, at least, to his own version of it, as previously laid down in mammoth academic treatises.