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Strange Bliss
Strange Bliss by Katherine Mansfield. Pushkin Press While perusing books to read I came across the name Katherine Mansfield. It’s a name familiar to me but I couldn’t honestly say I was familiar with her work. And so I decided Strange Bliss could be my introduction. This book is a curated collection of six short stories. Both the first and last stories are the longest ones and feature the Burnell family. They both follow a similar format of being sequences of snapshots over the course of a day. In the first, “Prelude” the family is moving into a more rural location and we see the move through the eyes of…
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And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon
Russian literature did not feature at all in my education, be it secondary or tertiary. It wasn’t much on my radar either. I definitely had an awareness for some of those fat novels written by some of the greats. I must admit I was well into adulthood before Gogol hit my radar and despite having a paperback of his stories on a bookshelf for many years, it was this book that finally motivated me to finally read his work. I thought short stories would surely be easier than one of those long novels but I was mistaken. It definitely wasn’t an easy read for me. Perhaps this was not helped…