the author has always written close to the bone, and Notebooks of the Mediterranean sharpens that instinct into something approaching grace.

An issue from the Hudson archive — essays, verse, and review of the season's most necessary books.

Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.

Listening to the Margins

Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.

“What looks at first like restraint is, on closer reading, a kind of generosity.”

There are passages in this book that ask to be read twice, not because they are difficult, but because the first reading is too occupied with surprise to register the music underneath.

Character, here, is not announced; it accumulates. We learn who these people are the way we learn it of our neighbours: through small refusals, half-finished meals, the books left face-down on a kitchen chair.

What the Book Knows

Plot, in the conventional sense, is almost beside the point. What propels the pages is closer to attention — the writer's, then ours — turning over the ordinary until it gives up its odd, persistent light.

It would be wrong to call Notebooks of the Mediterranean flawless. It is something better than that: alive.