"The Bats" by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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First published in Zyzzyva (Spring 1993) and subsequently included in her short story collection Arranged Marriage (Anchor/Doubleday 1995).

Jane Austen's Persuasion

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"[Lady Russell] could not imagine a man more exactly what he ought to be than Mr Elliott; nor did she ever enjoy a sweeter feeling than the hope of seeing him receive the hand of her beloved Anne in Kellynch church, in the course of the following autumn."

(This passage--from the end of Chapter 17--is one of my favorites despite the fact that it's about her cousin rather than Captain Wentworth.)

Fiction and Poetry

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"The Motherhood Poems" by Beth Alvarado (short fiction from Necessary Fiction, June 3, 2009)

"Death of the Right Breast" by Bernard Henrie (a poem from Stirring, September 2005)

"Yes" by Barbara Crooker

"So I said yes to everything, yes to the green hills
rolling out ahead, yes to the hayfield tied up in rolls,
yes to the clouds blooming like peonies in the sky’s
blue meadow, the long tongue of the road lolling
out before me, yes to the life of travel, yes to the other
life at home, yes to the daisies freckling the ditch, . . . ."

Continued in The Anglican Theological Review, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Winter 2009), p. 113. Also available online at FindArticles.net and in Serenity Prayers: Prayers, Poems, and Prose to Soothe Your Soul, compiled by June Cotner (Andrews McMeel, 2009).

The last line is reminiscent of Molly Bloom's wonderful soliloquy from the end of James Joyce's Ulysses.

The Lives of Others

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Das Leben der Anderen (English title: The Lives of Others), in German, written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and starring Ulrich Mühe as Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, Sebastian Koch as Georg Dreyman, and Martina Gedeck as Christa-Maria Sieland.

IMDb has a good summary of the basic plot:
In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives.

Two poems, a movie, and another David Sedaris collection

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"House Fire" by Allison Seay (poem from Born Magazine, originally published in Blue Mesa Review, No. 18, Fall 2006)

"Advice for Women on the Graveyard Shift" by Karen J. Weyant (poem from Broadsided Press, May 2009)

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Company, 2008)

La Tourneuse de pages (English title: The Page Turner), in French, directed by Denis Dercourt and starring Déborah François as the adult Mélanie Prouvost, Catherine Frot and Pascal Greggory as Ariane and Jean Fouchécourt, and Antoine Martynciow as Tristan Fouchécourt. This was not the best film I've ever seen, but the music alone is worth the price of admission (or rental, I guess, in this case). It was billed as a thriller and I was expecting a climax along the lines of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, but this was much more subtle.

A Few Books and a Few Movies

Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor by Perri Klass (Basic Books, 2007)

Naked by David Sedaris (Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 1997)

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Company, 2004)

Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by David Sedaris (Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 1994) [though in reality I'd more strongly recommend the essays, especially "SantaLand Diaries"]


Instead of linking these books anywhere, I'm going to take an opportunity to recommend IndieBound, which has a pretty slick Indie Store Finder located at http://www.indiebound.org/indie-store-finder.


Now, a few movies:

The Painted Veil, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham, directed by John Curran and starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts as Walter and Kitty Fane.

Synecdoche, New York, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard, Catherine Keener as Adele Lack, Samantha Morton as Hazel, and about a thousand other people. Maybe literally. This movie was huge in scope and subject matter, though maybe you could boil it down to a discussion of the meaning of life and death. I found it a little intense.

Lost in Translation, written and directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Bill Murray as Bob Harris, Scarlett Johansson as Charlotte, and Giovanni Ribisi as John, Charlotte's husband. I saw this again recently. It didn't have quite the same effect this time, largely because I had seen it before, I think, and knew where it was going. But I still think that Sofia Coppola very effectively recreated the quiet, lonely world that seems so intimately entwined with extended bouts of insomnia.