The Kindling, No. 1 (beige)

From the editor

Seeing the world as if for the first time

A first issue ought to declare its tastes, so here is ours. Nearly everything this week is about attention: a woman watching the sun go out on a hillside in Washington State, a man spending a decade with a falcon, a seminary student at a campfire on Good Friday, a man returning to a city after ten lost years. Each one is a small lesson in looking.

The picks are grouped by mood, not genre: two to a mood, one of them marked as the place to start. If you only have ten minutes this week, read the Chekhov: it is the issue's one must-read. Then a poem, and the issue closes with one longer recommendation and a few finds from around the web.

It is spring in Sydney. The light is longer in the evenings. Use it.

The Editor

Mood one

A slow Sunday morning

Tea, a window, nowhere to be. Books you can enter and leave without losing the thread, and neither needs finishing this week.

Start here

Book · Italy · 1963 · tr. Jenny McPhee

Family Lexicon

Natalia Ginzburg

Readers who know Ginzburg from the essays of The Little Virtues will find her most fully herself here. It is a portrait of her family in Turin before, during and after Fascism, built almost entirely from the phrases they repeated to one another: her father the histologist storming through the house calling people nitwits, her mother's endless curiosity, the brothers' quarrels. Ginzburg herself barely appears until halfway through. The war and the race laws arrive the way they do in a household, through who is missing at dinner. It won the Strega Prize in 1963.

Each chapter is a self-contained vignette, so one with breakfast is the right dose. Read twenty pages and you will start noticing your own family's lexicon.

Find itLook for: NYRB Classics, 2017 translation

Or instead

Book · England · 1967 · natural history

The Peregrine

J. A. Baker

An Essex librarian followed peregrines for ten winters, then compressed the decade into one season's diary, October to April. Almost no Baker in it: only hunting, weather, estuary light, and a man trying to see as a hawk sees. Dense, astonishing prose. Read one entry at a time.

Find itLook for: NYRB Classics edition

Mood two

When the mind wants stretching

For the hour when you want to come away thinking differently about something large. Both picks are about meeting something that does not see the way we do.

Start here

Essay · 1982 · about 25 minutes

Total Eclipse

Annie Dillard

In February 1979 Dillard and her husband drove inland to a hill in central Washington to watch the sun disappear. The essay begins in a strange hotel lounge and ends somewhere close to the end of the world, and in between she describes totality more truthfully than anyone has managed before or since. It was chosen for The Best American Essays of the Century.

Short, complete, and it will change how you read the word "seeing" for a while afterwards. Read it in one sitting, in daylight.

Find itOnline: The Atlantic (may be paywalled). Look for: Teaching a Stone to Talk

Or instead

Book · Australia · 2016 · science & philosophy

Other Minds

Peter Godfrey-Smith

A Sydney philosopher of science dives with octopuses off the New South Wales coast and asks what a mind is when it evolved on a branch of life far from ours. The octopus keeps most of its neurons in its arms. Best taken a chapter at a time.

Find itLook for: any paperback edition

Mood three

Twenty minutes before bed

Two short stories, each finished before the lamp goes off, and both free to read online tonight.

Start here

If you read one thing this week

Story · Russia · 1894 · about 10 minutes

The Student

Anton Chekhov

Four pages. A seminary student walks home on a freezing Good Friday evening, hungry and gloomy about the poverty of Russia across a thousand years. He stops at two widows' campfire and retells the story of Peter warming himself at a fire on the night he denied Christ. One of the women begins to cry. On the walk home the student feels the past and the present joined by a single chain. Chekhov told Bunin it was his favourite of his own stories.

Ten minutes for a story about why stories matter, and an ending that grows more ambiguous each time you return to it.

Find itFree online: American Literature

Or instead

Story · USA · 1939 · about 6 minutes

The Lost Decade

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The shortest story Fitzgerald published, about 1,100 words, in Esquire a year before he died. A young staffer takes a mysterious visitor to lunch in Manhattan; the man looks at the city as if touching the world again after ten years away. Where he has been is the quiet revelation.

Find itFree online: Project Gutenberg Australia

Mood four

Something light

Wit, mischief and comedy of manners: light in the hand, not in the head.

Start here

Novella · Brazil · 1882 · tr. Margaret Jull Costa & Robin Patterson

The Alienist

Machado de Assis

The funniest thing in this issue. Dr Simão Bacamarte returns to the small town of Itaguaí, founds an asylum and devotes himself to the science of madness. Then he starts committing the townspeople, one by one, on ever more rigorous grounds, until the logic of his diagnosis turns around and bites. A satire of experts, bureaucracy and certainty by the grandson of freed slaves who became Brazil's greatest writer. It reads like Gogol by way of Voltaire.

An evening's length, a laugh on most pages, and a door into a writer most English readers have never opened.

Find itLook for: The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis (Liveright, 2018)

Or instead

Book · England · 1952

Excellent Women

Barbara Pym

Mildred Lathbury, a clergyman's daughter in post-war London, is the woman everyone relies on and no one notices, until glamorous neighbours move in below. Jumble sales, cups of tea, parish cruelties, in a voice so dry you read sentences twice. A book for a week of tired evenings.

Find itLook for: Virago Modern Classics edition

Interlude

A poem

One poem a week, read twice: once quickly, once aloud.

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.

Poem · England · written 1877

Pied Beauty

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Eleven lines in praise of things that are spotted, streaked and mismatched: cow hides, trout, chestnuts, ploughed fields, the tools of every trade. Hopkins wrote it as a young Jesuit and never saw it published; it appeared in 1918, almost thirty years after his death. Read it aloud and the sounds do the seeing for you: "fickle, freckled", "swift, slow; sweet, sour".

A spring poem for a spring Sunday, and the shortest lesson in attention in this issue.

Find itFree online: Poetry Foundation

Closing page

Before you go

One longer recommendation for the weeks ahead, and three places on the web that are worth a bookmark.

Long read · novella · 1962

"Genesis", from Wallace Stegner's Collected Stories

Find itLook for: Penguin Classics Collected Stories

Stegner's collection opens beautifully, and many readers find that some later stories feel more worked over. He chose and ordered the stories himself, and the strongest tend to sit early. One exception is worth jumping ahead for. "Genesis", near the end, is really a novella: a young Englishman joins a cattle drive in Saskatchewan and is caught by a killing winter. It is the best thing in the book, and admirers rate it among the finest writing about the working West. Afterwards, Wolf Willow, Stegner's memoir of the plains where it first appeared, is the natural next book.

From the web

A Personal Anthology

Weekly Substack · free · Fridays

Each week a writer or critic picks twelve favourite short stories and introduces each in a paragraph, with links to read them online where possible. Since 2017 it has gathered more than three thousand stories by some fourteen hundred authors. A recent issue gathered writers' debut stories, from Joyce's first version of "The Sisters" to Flannery O'Connor's "The Geranium".

The Common Reader

Substack · Henry Oliver · partly paid

A self-described nerdy literature newsletter with over 33,000 readers. Oliver writes about classics as a reader, not a theorist, with strong opinions and a lot of curiosity: Austen, George Eliot, Walter Scott, biography, late bloomers. Good for the pleasure of finding out what another sharp reader made of a book you already know.

Marilynne Robinson, The Art of Fiction

The Paris Review · 2008 · interview

The author of Gilead in conversation over six meetings: on Calvin, Idaho, why she waited twenty years between novels, and how character comes from emotional entanglement. The Paris Review also unlocks a few archive pieces every Sunday in its free Redux newsletter.