
Home from the Sea
Melville wrote about sperm whales and harpoons when he was landlocked in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and living in a house of strong-willed women. How can a writer’s desk serve as a creative island?
Melville wrote about sperm whales and harpoons when he was landlocked in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and living in a house of strong-willed women. How can a writer’s desk serve as a creative island?
“When you visit someone at home, the door into the house…is rich with the textures of presence from all the welcomes and valedictions that have occurred on that threshold.”
For a surreal reconstruction of an almost unbearable home life after the revolution, nothing beats the tales of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, one of Russia’s finest living writers. In “The Story of a Painter” an artist loses his Moscow apartment to swindler who then resells it to another family.
No one captures America’s transition from homesteading to rootlessness better than the heartland writer Marilynne Robinson. In her luminous novel, Housekeeping, she asks: Are some of us natural nesters and others born vagabonds?
Ladies, if you are considering a mate, explore his living quarters. They’ll tell you more about his personality than his posts on Instagram and Facebook.