Category Archives: Waters, Sarah
“Bored by Fear”: Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests
Once, she never would have thought it possible for a person to be bored by fear. She recalled all the various terrors that had seized and shaken her since the thing had begun: the black panics, the dreads and uncertainties, the physical cavings-in. There hadn’t been a dull moment. But she was almost bored now, she […]
Incalculably Diffusive? The Impact of the Humanities
From the Novel Readings archives, a response to early reports on the UK’s “Research Excellence Framework.” Collini’s critique (and this post) came out in November 2009 (sadly his piece now appears to be behind a paywall). UK academics can no doubt update us on how far his concerns have proven justified. At the TLS, Stefan Collini […]
Recent Reading: Ghosts (or Not)
It was an interesting experience reading Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry one after the other. Both are well-written, original books by consummate story-tellers. Both invite us to imagine a lot of “what if” questions about our world, particularly about whether there’s more to it than we can see, whether […]
This Week in My Classes (November 25, 2009)
In Nineteenth-Century Fiction it’s time for Jude the Obscure. It always strikes me as a fairly gloomy way to wrap up the term, but there’s not much I can do in a course that’s supposed to cover “Dickens to Hardy”! Maybe because of the time I’ve been spending this week thinking about the “impact of […]
Summer Re-Run: Sarah Waters, The Night Watch
My new reading right now is mostly samples of the books I’m considering for my Mystery and Detective Fiction course, and I don’t have much to say about them at this point, so I thought that over the next couple of weeks I’d re-post and lightly update a couple of earlier things that otherwise would […]
Sarah Waters, The Night Watch
I’ve been eagerly waiting for the paperback edition of this novel, as I am a big fan of Fingersmith (such a smart novel, artistically and intellectually) and was thoroughly entertained by Tipping the Velvet. The Night Watch too was easily readable, deceptively so, I’ve ended up thinking, as I moved through it smoothly only to […]
