What Would The Sextet In Cloud Atlas – As Described In The Novel – Sound Like?

The piece is scored for violin, cello, flute, oboe, clarinet, and piano; the composer in the novel describes his inspiration this way: “Echoes of Scriabin’s White Mass, Stravinsky’s lost footprints, chromatics of the more lunar Debussy, but truth is I don’t know where it came from.” J. Bryan Lowder unpacks all those references.

Ian McEwan On The Novella: ‘The Perfect Form Of Prose Fiction’

“It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who’s a genius on his best days). And this child is the means by which many first know our greatest writers. Readers come to Thomas Mann by way of Death in Venice, Henry James by The Turn of the Screw, Kafka by Metamorphosis, Joseph Conrad by Heart of Darkness.”

Follow The Red Line To Find Amsterdam’s Homeless Van Goghs

If visitors to the city’s Museumplein “look up they will then see a red line in the sky and if they follow that down narrow streets, across crowded junctions, over bridges, under a grim 1960s office block, and through pretty squares – they will arrive at the Van Gogh museum’s new home for the next six months, the Amsterdam branch of the Hermitage.”

‘I Was Ayn Rand’s Lover’ (The New Yorker Finds Its Inner Onion)

“I was a fresh-faced seventeen-year-old, she was a prominent international author – and we were lovers. By ‘lovers’ I mean: we were constantly raping each other. Well, first there’d be a long speech. Usually by her. Then we’d gaze deeply at one another, and our souls would begin speaking the only language a man and a woman ever need: the language of mutual self-benefit.”