David Ellison

Dolls are corpses that we like.

And at various points, writers have acknowledged that they're corpses or filmmakers or whatever, and they turn into Chucky or something monstrous, something unthinkable, that for reasons that are horrifying to contemplate, we've allowed into the most intimate recesses of our home.

Oh, well, definitely.

I mean, certainly in terms of my research interests, the kind of discomfort that people experience at home issues from the gap between the expectation about what home will deliver in terms of feelings of security and

and what actually occurs.

Things creak.

There are unexpected eruptions of smells.

Nothing sits properly.

And it takes a long time for us to develop skeptical competence to understand that those are carpentry problems or legal issues with noisy neighbors.

But for a while there, we're still clinging to a kind of animist view of the world where these might be things, animals, but also maybe even spirits or things, even if we're terribly rational about it, we can't quite explain.

Oh, Stefan Zweig collected novellas.

Zweig is born in 1880, dies in 1942, Austrian novelist, but a classic cosmopolite, wanders around Europe and writes these extraordinarily detailed accounts of the old world being supplanted by the new in the crumbling of the most intimate details.

So it's a really fine-grained novel

uh examination of the end of things uh and boy that strikes a chord now jane rawson what about you

Reading for work, but I do have a pile that I'm definitely going to get to over the summer, and that's Everything by Elizabeth Harrower, who I just adore.

one of arguably, not even arguably, our most important living novelists, a contemporary of White, overlooked for a long time.

Her work is back in attention or receiving the attention it deserves.

Yeah, text publishing have done a magnificent job, I think, bringing her back.