Let the cold winds blow--we'e got reading to do!

The Winter issue of the Quarterly Conversation is here!

Some highlights:

• I've got a review of Gjertrud Schackenberg's formal and moving new book Heavenly Questions.

• Patrick Kurp takes on two new collections of poetry by Borges.

• Geoff Maturin reviews Ananios of Kleitor, a strange, inventive, and admirable book of scholarship about an ancient Greek poet . . . who never existed.

• David Auerbach adds a forgotten nineteenth-century Russian, Nikolai Reskov, to our to-read list. (And believe it or not, I'd just been wondering where to go next in Russian literature . . . )

• Not to be outdone, Damion Searls writes about the best Japanese writer you've never heard of, Yasushi Inoue. Searls writes, "Certainly no Japanese writer between Natsume Soseki and Haruki Murakami, in my view, including Japan’s two excellent Nobel prize winners, gives such intense and consistent literary pleasure."

• Matt Jakubowski offers a lengthy article whose title gives a sense of his vexed, extended engagement with the work at hand: "Spoiler, Or, A Reckoning with Sentimental Habits by way of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet." Jakubwoski wrestles with the genius of Durrell and the evil of Durrell in equal parts; I'm only midway through that article, and thus far I'm not sure whether I'm going to leave it more or less likely to read Durrell, whose books have been sitting on my shelf giving me a decadent eye for a while now.

And there's much, much more. Now you have no excuse for going outside in this horrible weather!