Dreamers Rise

Two passages from Peter Blegvad's "Numinous Objects and Their Manufacture": Objects proliferate as never before, but they are...

The sixth annual retrospective of the year's postings at this address. The Prehistory of Cronopios, Famas & Esperanzas (Episto...

For just shy of thirty years I've maintained a little spiral notebook (now missing its back cover) in which I've recorded the partic...

The Spectator, 6 November 1852: Five publishers were yesterday summoned by Mr. Panizzi for the non-delivery of books at the British Museu...

At first glance, Ana María Matute's 1960 novel Primera memoria seems much of a piece with the narratives with which she ended her car...

THE LATE HOUR A man walks towards town, a slack breeze smelling of earth and the raw green of trees blows at his back. He drags the we...

I seem to be reading the late Ana María Matute in reverse chronological order, having started with her last, uncompleted, novel, Demonios ...

Aurora Bernárdez, the first wife and literary executor of Julio Cortázar, has died in Paris. Though the couple divorced in the 1960s, after ...

After the scarcely mitigated hell of the recently concluded election cycle, nothing would be easier (or, it would seem, more defensible) tha...

No quiero ser un espectro más de esta casa... When she died earlier this year, the Spanish writer Ana María Matute left behind an unfini...

Back in the late 1970s I read this translation by the late Gabriel Berns of what is actually only the first volume (comprising Books One a...

Andy Irvine has just released a live CD of his 70th-birthday bash two years ago, with a DVD promised soon, both of which are available di...

Things that fit in the hand. Things that follow us, but only from a safe distance. Things that are closer than they appear in the rear-vi...

This 1913 novel by Roger Martin du Gard may come across today as a somewhat curious project, a book that is not only a "novel of idea...

I started reading modern Japanese literature in Spanish translation because there were a couple of books I wanted to read that didn't ...

I read this novel by Rupert Thomson shortly after it first appeared in the US in 1996 and again last week, and both times I had the same r...

There will be paragraphs. There will be punctuation. There will be no epigraph in Greek. There will be no cell phones, computers, or t...

A few years ago when I was doing some volunteer tutoring, one of my students was a young man from Guatemala (I'll call him S., though ...

"The circumstances of my birth weren't extraordinary at all but they were a bit colorful, because it was a birth that took place in...

Every morning for the past few weeks I've been taking advantage of near-perfect weather and my early-rising habits to go for a long walk...