Peter Murmann

Can’t wait until this book arrives in my mailbox. My own review will come later. In the meantime here is what Anthony Gottlieb wrote in the NYTimes: It’s always gratifying to hear a new twist on an old joke. In the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup,” Rufus T. Firefly, played by Groucho, is handed the [Read More]

One afternoon of my sophomore year in college my bicycle was stolen. For reasons I no longer can reconstruct, I decided not to buy another used bike, but henceforth to hitchhike to class. I met many interesting people this way: Professors, sex therapists, construction workers, mothers who wanted to recruit boyfriends for their daughters and [Read More]

Don Quixote was too heavy a book to haul for a third time across the Atlantic. The taxi already waiting, I quickly grabbed Hugo Hamilton’s childhood autobiography from my bookshelf where it was sitting for the last two years after having received a very good review in one of my favorite news outlets. Having finished [Read More]

Love at first sight may be a romantic illusion. Wild excitement at first sight is certainly real. That’s what I experienced reading the first couple of pages of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I quickly realized that this collection is a literary event not to be missed. When I was in college, I bought myself [Read More]

A couple of months ago (March 2003) I started reading Joseph Roth’s newpaper columns about life in Berlin in the 1920s.  He turns out to be a master of short essays on social life. I became so enamored with his powerfully perceptive prose that I started to read his novels. Savoy is a fine story [Read More]