Fish Can Sing

Laxness, Halldor

Abandoned as a baby, Alfgrimur is content to spend his days as a fisherman living in the turf cottage outside Reykjavik with the elderly couple he calls grandmother and grandfather. There he shares the mid-loft with a motley bunch of eccentrics and philosophers who find refuge in the simple respect for ...

Lost Cat

Mary Gaitskill

'Last year I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead but I don't know for certain.' So begins Mary Gaitskill's stunning long essay, the closest thing she has written to a memoir, about a lost cat and a pair of adopted children. In this searing p...