It’s November, when reality takes a turn for the dark, the cold and the grim. In November, more than most months, we need novels. Why is that? A few days ago I began Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and came upon one of those passages that seemed to answer a question …
Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again. —Andre Gide You might think, given how hopeless we humans are, how condemned we seem be to repeat the worst mistakes of our history over and over, that our literature would have been completely …
