Friday Links
January 2, 2026
Saint Adalhard de Corbie (courtesy of Wikicommons)
Muriel Spark’s Strange Brilliance
John Wilson’s Year in Reading
Caravaggio and Us
Falling into Place: An Interview with Erin O’Luanaigh
“Green Questions” by Rachel Hadas
I opened a bookshop. It was the best, worst thing I’ve ever done
Muriel Spark’s Strange Brilliance
Ian Penman reviews the new Muriel Spark biography, Electric Spark, by Frances Wilson
If the first mystery is Spark’s prodigal talent, the second is why she didn’t complete her first novel until early middle age, though she had by then published several volumes of poetry, literary biography, and critical editions of favorite writers. One answer is that the pulse of fiction had to wait until, as Wilson puts it, she had “hoarded enough material—metaphorically and literally—to begin the process of alchemical reduction.” Spark’s early adult years often read like dizzy fiction themselves: a succession of unlikely meetings and bizarre coincidences, each random-seeming moment charged with a secret logic that would ultimately serve her vocation.
John Wilson’s Year in Reading
You can’t go wrong reading a John Wilson-recommended book:
This list would have been different a couple of months ago, or yesterday—maybe even in the wee hours tonight—but here are some of the books I particularly enjoyed (excluding poetry, which I will visit another time).
Caravaggio and Us
Jaspreet Singh Boparai on Caravaggio:
When Caravaggio arrived in Rome in the early 1590s, he was surrounded by repetitive mannerism and stale classicism. Art seemed to have stagnated in the Eternal City since the death of Michelangelo in 1564. All the interesting, innovative painters appeared to be in Venice or Bologna. Caravaggio observed that Roman painters were not depicting the world around them in any recognizable form. This insight led him to develop a third way of painting, which was known after his death as “Caravaggismo” and became dominant in Rome for a generation.
Falling into Place: An Interview with Erin O’Luanaigh
Nicholas Pierce interview poet Erin O’Luanaigh for Nimrod.
When I moved from singing to poetry, I understood nearly every element of the latter in terms of the former, but especially useful was the analogy I drew between the poetic speaker or persona and the actress-singer. Both artists, I felt, were equally dependent upon someone to build the world of the song or poem for, someone to enter and enjoy it. Though I don’t mean to suggest that my poems aspire to anything like mass appeal, even by poetic standards, I am motivated by the thought that I’m doing something similar in poetry as I was in music—that is, that I’m attempting to offer something pleasurable and even, dare I say, entertaining to a reader.
“Green Questions” by Rachel Hadas
A new poem from Rachel Hadas over at One Art.
I opened a bookshop. It was the best, worst thing I’ve ever done
Chloe Fox shares a month by month account of her “I bought a bookshop” experience:
“A bookshop?” says the solicitor we have instructed with the conveyancing of the purchase. “Lovely, romantic idea. You’ll go under in a year.”
