Dreamers Rise

He climbs the wooden stairway, his advancing shadow traced by sparse incandescent bulbs that emit, out of their little prisons of wire mesh,...

One of the paths I often walk is bordered on one side by inpenetrable swamp, but today I spotted a place where I could cross easily onto ...

The translator Gregory Rabassa has died, according to a notice from the Associated Press. Rabassa was a professor for many years at Quee...

I got up early and set out on foot for the local park in search of a family of barred owls who either weren't around today or were keepi...

Thomas Hardy: Then these children of the open air, whom even excess of alcohol could scarce injure permanently, betook themselves to the fie...

The ensemble known as The Gloaming (Thomas Bartlett, Dennis Cahill, Martin Hayes, Iarla Ó Lionáird, and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh) has rel...

Daniel Defoe: I heard of one infected creature, who, running out of his bed in his shirt, in the anguish and agony of his swellings, of whi...

I've gone for a walk today, as I often do when I can spare the time. I put my things away, pulled on my jacket, and headed up the hillsi...

Two poems about change, stone, farming, New England — and, obliquely, the ancient world. First up, Robert Frost: Of the Stones of the Place...

There were plenty of other kids in the neighborhood when I was small, and most of the time I played with them, but I had another friend who...

Milan Kundera: Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judg...

Forest's edge, March 2016.

I don't know why this little body of water bears the name that it does. It's true that it's a bit isolated, though there's ...

Wintergreen. Of late I've been taking weekend walks in a nearby nature preserve. The most surprising thing about these walks may be the ...

Edward Gibbon on how the Roman emperor Diocletian, after abdicating the throne of his own free will, responded when his former co-emperor im...

At midnight, over the murmur of the wind, a knock at the door jolts us awake. It's a Roman centurion, in full regalia, but he's read...

Winding along at the bottom of the gorge is a dangerously narrow wheel-road, occupying the bed of a former torrent. Following this road to i...

We live on a small lot on a fully developed street a couple of blocks off the main drag in a busy suburban town. The train station and the ...

More than one hundred and fifty years ago, Austin Reed, an African-American inmate of New York State's Auburn State Prison, wrote a boo...

"I despise the looks of a novel. The cursed infernal things, I can't bear the sight of one. They are a curse to every one that read...