"There is, across all the biographies, a strange sense that, for Dahl, life did not grow bigger and richer, but smaller and shallower—that, by the end of it, he had shrunk into himself, rather like Mr. and Mrs. Twit.
[...]
Matilda’s smallness thus differs from ordinary human vulnerability. It measures the cultural fragility of reading literature in a world that refuses to protect or nourish it."

#book #review #literarycriticism #RoaldDahl #MatthewDennison #MerveEmre

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/12/22/making-it-big-roald-dahl-teller-of-the-unexpected/

“To manage to write and to write well, that’s #grace. And I think perhaps life in itself might be a kind of grace. I can completely understand people who decide to leave this life. It’s an awful place in many ways. You can also think of death as a grace. To be here all the time, it must be awful.” —#JonFosse in #TheNewYorker speaking with #MerveEmre https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/jon-fosses-search-for-peace #writing #writers #playwright