Currently reading.

Primo Levi was a Holocaust survivor and became renown for his novels about it. This book however is about Jewish resistance fighters who torment German forces at the end of the war. Levi died in 1987, after a fall from a third story apartment landing. While no one is certain whether it was intentional or not, it was officially ruled a suicide.

Currently reading.

A lot of people – mostly men – denigrate Jane Austen as a “women’s writer.” But those who do fail to recognize her innovations as one of the first practitioners of “free indirect style” – a narrative technique later popularized by Flaubert that has been the standard for fiction for nearly two centuries now. Austen is essential to the history of literature – not as a woman, but as a writer.