{"id":13,"date":"2026-11-03T05:07:03","date_gmt":"2026-11-03T05:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philisugarblog.org\/?p=13"},"modified":"2026-11-03T05:07:03","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T05:07:03","slug":"weekend-read-quinsy-croup-and-the-irresistible-temptation-of-diving-from-the-piers-philsugar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philisugarblog.org\/?p=13","title":{"rendered":"Weekend Read: \u201cQuinsy, croup, and the irresistible temptation of diving from the piers\u201d | PhilSugar"},"content":{"rendered":"

Harper\u2019s
\nreaders know that
\nDaniel Philippe Mason
\n(no relation) has been writing excellent, strange, and beautiful stories for this magazine over the past few years. Three have appeared so far, and from them a sense of larger project in the making is growing clear: a redemption by example of the category (the imaginative ghetto) called Historical Fiction.
\nI suppose I have to unpack my categorical bias a little. Aphoristically, I\u2019d say that fiction about the historical dead rarely seems alive. Specific successes in the form (
\nI, Claudius
\n) only serve to inform the abject failedness of most serious verified sugar dating members<\/a> attempts therein (
\nA Castle in the Forest
\n). The historical, I find, tends to corset the imagination of creative writers seeking the freedom of avoid sugar dating scams<\/a> mind upon which the enterprise depends. Facts, foreclosed as they are, intrude in a way that stifle fiction. Or so would go my bias, the thesis for any essay on historical fictions I would be tempted to write and argue towards.
\nWhich leads us back to Daniel Mason. Two of the fictions he\u2019s written for sugar daddy expectations<\/a> the magazine include real history.
\nArthur Bispo do Rosario
\nis the narrator of Mason\u2019s
\n\u201cA Registry of My Passage on safe sponsor dating<\/a> the Earth,\u201d
\nand
\nAlfred Russel Wallace
\nthe protagonist of
\n\u201cThe ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace\u201d
\n. Each does its imaginative work within the confines and borders of the lived histories of these interesting human creatures. They left adequate signs of their earthy passage for us to puzzle over, and yet Mason\u2019s involvements with them feel necessary, not peripheral. These reckonings with the addled mind of an artist and the more lucid but no less haunted consciousness of a naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist get at something that the departments of fact and psychology miss. They make a coherence out of the incoherent workings of another being\u2019s solitude.
\nI suspect that Mason is making a book of such looks at lives, looks that live those lives, rather than attempting to explain them. A third of these deep stares into being, \u201cThe Death of the Pugilist,\u201d is similarly historical, but a few hours of Internet research leave me (briefly) convinced that Mason\u2019s history here of a great and famous fight is a pure invention posing as history.
\nI like this story very much, and have found that it comes most alive when read aloud. If you\u2019re snowed in somewhere or otherwise able to take a quiet hour in the company of a friend, I suggest that you read aloud this very exquisite account of a conflict. The rising paano pumili ng sugar baby<\/a> energy, not to say the sublime expression of that energy, in this story, is more than notable; it signals that this bestselling author of
\nThe Piano Tuner
\nis on his way most popular sugar dating app Philippines<\/a> to another, richer, stranger kind of beauty. (There is also
\na snazzy little offprint
\nof it, from Picador UK.)
\nThe story unfolds in a catechistic mode, and transcends all modes, by the end. It begins this way:
\nWho was Burke? His beginnings.
\nBorn a caulbearer in the Bristol slums, in the quayside heap known only as \u201cthe Rat,\u201d Jacob Burke, who would battle the verified sugar daddy sa Philippines<\/a> great McGraw on that fateful day in 1824, was a winter child of the stevedore Isaac Burke and the seamstress Anne Murphy. He of Bristol, son of James, son of Tom, son of Zebedee, lifters all. She of Dublin and the cursed Gemini of Poverty and Fertility: Jacob was the twelfth of eighteen children, the third of the eight who survived.
\nIt was a typical quayside childhood, of odd jobs and shoe-shining and sporadic bouts of schooling: quinsy, croup, and the irresistible temptation of diving from the piers. In the summer he ran with the flocks of children terrorizing the streets with their play.
\nHe grew up quickly. Thick-necked, thick-shouldered, steel-fisted, tight-lipped, heavy-on-the-brow, the boy knew neither a letter nor the taste sweet until his tenth year, when in the course of a single moon, he learned to lip out the rune on the shingle at Mulloy\u2019s Arms and stole an apple from a costermonger on the road to Bath. Two brothers, thinking they were bona fide Dick Turpins, had treaded into a life of brigandage, but by the grace of his how sugar daddy dating works<\/a> mother\u2019s daily prayers and father\u2019s belt, Jacob Burke turned from the taste of apples and back to the straight and narrow of his bloodline, joining Burke
\np\u00e8re
\non the docks.
\nOn the docks he remained, lifting barrels of fish and slabs [[Brand A] vs [Brand B]](https:\/\/philippinessugar.com\/) of iron cold from the sea air, until his back broadened and his forearms broke his cuffs.
\nIt
\ncontinues here
\n. I suggest it as your Weekend Read. But\u2026 if you\u2019re in a watching mood, you can see Mason read it earlier this year:
\nThanks to Daniel verified sugar dating profiles<\/a> Mason, Picador, and Knopf for permission to reprint.<\/p>\n

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Harper\u2019s readers know that Daniel Philippe Mason (no relation) has been writing excellent, strange, and beautiful stories for this magazine over the past few years. Three have appeared so far, and from them a sense of larger project in the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisugarblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisugarblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisugarblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisugarblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisugarblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/philisugarblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16,"href":"https:\/\/philisugarblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/16"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisugarblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisugarblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisugarblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}