Not freely available online, unless you have registered at the site already, but the New Yorker fiction issue includes a must-read piece by David Grossman on Bruno Schulz, the writer whose stories spurred Grossman's extraordinary See Under: Love.

Hmmmm, that novel is due in my life for a re-read; and so is Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, as this Open Letters Monthly piece by John Cotter reminded me (link via Maud Newton).

I vividly remember reading both of those books for the first time. The Grossman was given to me by an Israeli friend in grad school, and I read it with amazement and delight. The Burgess conjures up an almost hallinatorily intense scene of me sitting (it was a very beautiful spring day, with clear blue skies) on the bleachers on the school playing fields, age 13 and dressed in the glen plaid skirt and polo shirt that were our team uniforms, reading frantically and desperately hoping that I would not catch the coach's eye and spur her thought that she should put me in at point for the remainder of the lacrosse game - a sport I truly, truly did not enjoy playing, and gave up very happily after that ninth-grade year...