Book Post | Ann Kjellberg | Substack

Fiction and literature

Diary: (2) Marina Warner on “The Books That Made Me”

Marina Warner has come to believe that we can’t live without the imaginative structures of myths and folktales, we absolutely need them, and she wonders…

Jul 25

Diary: (1) Marina Warner on “The Books That Made Me”

Serious readers once disparaged fairy tales and folklore as childish preoccupations but one reader came to see them as the building blocks of a communal…

Jul 23

Diary: Jean McGarry, New glasses

Reading Svetlana Alpers , studying Van Gogh and Vermeer, and getting new glasses

Jul 9

Douglas Bauer on Julie Otsuka

Harking back to a book that may be speaking to us now in new ways

Jun 25

Review: Anthony Domestico on Susan Choi

Susan Choi’s novel begins with actual flashlights, and it goes on restlessly to search the darkness with beams of light and awareness

Jun 19

Ann’s Notebooks

Announcing Our Summer 2025 Partner Bookstore: Page & Palette in Fairhope, Alabama!

A rambling bookstore on a busy corner refreshed by Gulf breezes welcomes visitors from all over the South and beyond

Jun 1 •

Notebook: Monuments

History is not only written by victors, it is composed of what victors choose to preserve, and what they throw away

Apr 27 •

Notebook: (2) Dismantling the Ideas Infrastructure

As the institutions bend, the defense of intellectual integrity is left to the powerless

Mar 31 •

The latest from

Ann Kjellberg

Announcing Our Summer 2025 Partner Bookstore: Page & Palette in Fairhope, Alabama!

History and society

Review: Christian Caryl on Elaine Pagels and Paula Fredriksen

The Greatest Show on Earth: How early Christianity conquered the world

Jul 16

Review: Barry Yourgrau on Nellie Campobello

A tenacious young woman takes hold of history and makes it her own

May 14

Review: Geoffrey O’Brien on ”The Third Reich of Dreams”

A journalist, prompted by her own troubled sleep, starts gathering dreams in 1933

Apr 30

Review: Sarah Ruden on Rebecca West

A writer who could think deeply and in crazy detail about important events that were recent, imminent, or actually happening

Apr 23

Review: Joy Williams on Studying Animal Grief

When scholarship and arrogance converge

Apr 16

Science and Nature

Review: Sarah Chayes on Robert Macfarlane, “Is a River Alive?”

A river is a tissue of dynamic and intimate relationships between arrowing, seeping, even air-wafted water and the land around, and the creatures within…

Jul 2

Diary: Jamaica Kincaid, The Kind of Gardener I Am Not

Encountering "the grandness of a living member of the vegetable kingdom blooming without wanting to be cared about by me or anyone who came before me"

Mar 9

Diary: Laura Marris, on Limulus polyphemus, the Atlantic horseshoe crab

As a child, I became fascinated with limulus and the way they carry other species, becoming itinerant microcosms of aquatic invertebrate life

Jul 14, 2024

Review: Brian Fagan on an Island Atlas

As islands lose their terrestrial configurations, the remembered and the imaginary, as well as science and nature, come together to define them

May 29, 2024

Review: (2) Charles Graeber, New books on altered states

Amitav Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes is a revelatory journey through identity and colonialism, power and class, appetite and addiction; George Fisher’s Beware…

May 1, 2024

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