LITERATURE

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?

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A Fairy Tale of Home

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.

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Houses are Ephemeral

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?

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