Next pick

"The Mighty Angel" by Jerzy Pilch, a Polish novel about "the alcoholic misadventures of a writer named Jerzy."

The soprano

I don't feel like I ever quite grasped the nature of the relationship between Sonechka and Maria Nikolaevna. Sometimes Sonechka seemed to admire the singer and sometimes to loathe her. Sometimes Maria treated Sonechka like a friend and sometimes like a servant. It was fairly bizarre, considering that they lived together and spent so much time in each other's company. Sonechka wanted to make Maria suffer, but at one point she also wanted to free her by shooting her husband. Any thoughts on this strange dynamic? Or on Sonechka's theory that some people are just imperturbably happy and that their happiness fundamentally sets them apart from others?

Sonechka

What are your thoughts on the first-person narrator in "The Accompanist"? Did you sympathize with her plight in life? Did her reactions to her circumstances seem normal and understandable, or perhaps somewhat pathological?

Miss Tita

What did you think of Miss Tita's character? I was struck when the narrator said it was "impossible to overestimate her simplicity." Were you surprised that she ultimately destroyed the papers she had been helping the narrator to secure?

Next pick: "The Accompanist"

This is a 1936 novella by Russian writer Nina Berberova, who lived in Paris between the two World Wars before moving to the States and a career teaching Russian literature at Yale and Princeton. I thought it looked intriguing (love! jealousy! desire! plotting!). First week of September?

Venice

Why do you think James set "The Aspern Papers" in Venice? What do you think the setting added to the story?

The papers

According to Wikipedia, Henry James "loathed publicity and zealously guarded his own privacy. A few years before his death he burned masses of old letters that he had received, and he often begged his correspondents not to publicize - or better yet, to destroy - the letters he sent to them."

What's your opinion of writers' private correspondence being dug up after their deaths to be analyzed publicly?