Dreamers Rise

This little "Manual of the Water Street Mission" in New York City was published in 1880, and seems to have served both as an int...

María Paz Otuño, writing of the late Spanish novelist Ana María Matute: Her idea of order was her own; with her writings she was very meti...

Rabelais: Bacbuc threw something into the fountain, and suddenly the water began to boil fiercely, as the great cauldron at Bourgueil does w...

A bit of incontrovertible wisdom from Herakleitos, in Guy Davenport's rendering: "We share a world when we are awake; each sleeper ...

This unidentified and undated snapshot shows the effects of time and much handling; it may have been folded in half at some point before bei...

'So you come from Paris,' said Pantagruel. 'And how do you spend your time, you gentlemen students at this same Paris?' ...

Any number of sources will inform you that the classic jazz composition "St. James Infirmary" is derived from an Anglo-America...

There is now a tentative publishing date as well as a cover image for the edition of Austin Reed's 19th-century prison memoir The Life...

My colleagues and I are seated around a picnic table at the edge of a farm field in the countryside. Below us, beneath some trees, is a smal...

In a 2013 post I juxtaposed the self-glorifying funeral instructions left by Oscar Thibault, the patriarch in Roger Martin du Gard's ...

Langston The image above is unlabelled, but knowing that its likely provenance was Oklahoma made it possible to take a guess at its loc...

Guss Crader Finally, a name we can trace; the reverse of this snapshot photograph bears an inscription from one Elder Guss Crader of Jennin...

Sallisaw This photograph may be the pivot of the collection. The image itself has some unusual features (which I'll note shortly), b...

Ancestors? The portion of the apparent family collection that I was able to obtain consists of thirteen photographs in a variety of for...

These photographs represent what are apparently fragments of a single African-American family album or family collection that was recent...

I won't be reading this new translation of Roger Martin du Gard's multi-volume novel Les Thibaults for the very good reason that...

A friend of mine recommended this volume of short stories, by an author whose name was unknown to me, and although I'm perhaps not the e...

THE GRAND PRIEST People of Argos, I say to you that this woman is committing sacrilege. Unhappiness be upon her and on any among you who ...

His life has been taken, but his voice is not stilled. Give the pocket history lesson above a listen. Below is his official biography, comp...

I rounded the corner, walking from one sleepy back street to another, and just for an instant a view opened out, between the trees in their ...