Naphtha, xylene, Japan drier

Mimi Lipson's story about a dog.

The Jersey Metal Detectorists' Society

This news item reminded me of a Roald Dahl tale in a volume I read again and again as a child.

(I think the stories I read most obsessively at that age were inevitably the Sherlock Holmes ones, and certainly R. L. Stevenson and other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tales of the uncanny, but Dahl's children's stories and also the stories of Joan Aiken were also a major influence....)

Postscript

Following "Encyclopedia" Brown-related thoughts, I am reminded that as a young person I thought this book a pinnacle of human literary ingenuity - I am surprised to see the Amazon reviews are all so negative!...

The Joyce-Armstrong Fragment

At the TLS, Jonathan Barnes on the power of Conan Doyle's short stories:

There are few English writers capable of crafting so arresting a first sentence as that which opens “The Lost Special”: “The confession of Herbert de Lernac, now lying under sentence of death at Marseilles, has thrown light upon one of the most inexplicable crimes of the century”. “Danger! Being the Log of Captain John Sirius” begins with: “It is an amazing thing that the English, who have the reputation of being a practical nation, never saw the danger to which they were exposed”. “The Horror of the Heights” has “The idea that the extraordinary narrative which has been called the Joyce-Armstrong Fragment is an elaborate practical joke evolved by some unknown person, cursed by a perverted and sinister sense of humour, has now been abandoned by all who have examined the matter”, and the opening of the first of the Holmes short stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia”, is famously inviting: “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman”. It is in these stories – and in the chronicles of Baker Street in particular – that one encounters the puzzling energy sensed in “The Adventure of The Creeping Man”, which is largely absent in the poetry, drama and longer fiction.

"I used to have a map"

At the Washington Post, Neely Tucker profiles Edward P. Jones (link courtesy of The Millions).

Almond Ladybits

Katy Guest interviews A. L. Kennedy for the Independent. I have to get that book, even though I do not usually read short stories...

(NB Sherman Alexie had a really extraordinary piece in the New Yorker last week - well worth reading...)