This novel was also published under the title Summer's Play.

The date of publication is significant. Stern was a member of a widely-flung cosmopolitan Jewish kinship network, which forms the basis for her most well-known works, the Rakonitz sequence of novels, beginning with The Matriarch (aka Tents of Israel). Her 1919 novel Children of No Man's ( Read more... )

On my mind lately, for whatever reason, was an episode that took place very early on in the Slow-Motion Disastrous Relationship. Possibly because, well, if you'd seen it in a novel you'd have known at once that it had a deeper symbolic resonance.

It was a rather hot, heavy, early summer day - a Sunday, I think, definitely a weekend. And we set out ( Read more... )

Have been going to my physiotherapist for nearly a year now, and today was thinking how the process seems like a useful metaphor for so many other things.

It's about slow developments over time, not a quick fix.

You improve a bit, then there's a bit of a plateau.

And the occasional regression.

Sometimes you just know that something is going to ( Read more... )