Book Post | Ann Kjellberg | Substack

Fiction and literature

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

Review: Padgett Powell on “Wildcat,” a film about Flannery O'Connor

Can a movie convey the essence and the quintessence of what the author tried to do and who she was?

Jun 11

Review: Edward Mendelson on a new edition of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries

Virginia Woolf envisioned a diary that “coalesced” into something ”composed with the aloofness of a work of art.“ Have we done it justice?

Jun 4

Review: David Stromberg on Chaim Grade

Chaim Grade’s novel Sons and Daughters, which was published serially in the New York Yiddish press in the 1960s and 70s, appears in English in 2025

May 28

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: 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

Review: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Stolen Pride”

Hochschild’s is a sociology about absence and its many costs

Apr 9

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

#nojs-banner { position: fixed; bottom: 0; left: 0; padding: 16px 16px 16px 32px; width: 100%; box-sizing: border-box; background: red; color: white; font-family: -apple-system, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol"; font-size: 13px; line-height: 13px; } #nojs-banner a { color: inherit; text-decoration: underline; } This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts