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Staff Picks: A Bouquet to Sybille Bedford; Martin Amis in Brooklyn

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This Week’s Reading

Five Dials released their latest issue last evening, but I’m still enchanted by “A Bouquet to Sybille Bedford,” with an essay by Aliette Martin, Bedford’s translator and literary executor. —Thessaly La Force

I’ve been racing through The Tale of the 1002nd Night, Joseph Roth’s last published novel. Set in pre-WWI Vienna, when “the world was deeply and frivolously at peace,” it begins with a fairy-tale visit by the Persian Shah and ends in bankruptcy, alcoholism, and despair. But Roth’s basic buoyancy—unless it is that of the translator, Michael Hofmann—makes this sad story a joy to read. —Robyn Creswell

Terry Eagleton’s On Evil is a cogent study of a subject about which much is assumed, and little questioned. I often found myself disagreeing with his views, but I appreciated his careful writing, his stylish analysis, and, most of all, his ability to make theory both relevant and exciting. —Rosalind Parry

This Sunday, I read David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary. The narrator writes nonlinearly about a relationship through definitions for words like aloof and fraught. Here’s Levithan with “catharsis”: “I took it out on the wall. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU. YOU FUCKER, I LOVE YOU.” Is the couple still together? We never find out. —Angela Melamud

Christian Lorentzen on Martin Amis’s move to Brooklyn. And rambling with W. G. Sebald in East Anglia. —T. L.