Dreamers Rise

In the office on the 73rd floor, high above the city, the president of the company passes me a handful of letters to mail and a note with t...

Pablo Neruda: It is very appropriate, at certain times of the day or night, to deeply observe objects at rest: the wheels that have covered ...

Two translations of the last lines of Pablo Neruda's "Ars Poetica," from Residence on Earth : but the truth is, suddenly, the ...

I have loved you from a distance Loved you from up close Like the tiny frog that breathes I can nestle in your cloak I'm a bit o...

Leonora Carrington: I had received a royal summons to pay a call on the sovereigns of my country. The invitation was made of lace, framing ...

Elena Poniatowska's Leonora is a biographical novel that closely follows the eventful life of her longtime friend, the artist and write...

Drue Heinz, the former publisher of Antaeus and the Paris Review , has died. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a lengthy obit . The past yea...

Kaye Blegvad's Dog Years is an appealing self-published illustrated story about her lifelong battle with depression, personified as ...

The great Irish piper Liam O'Flynn has died, according to RTÉ and other sources. I owe my interest in Irish music directly to O'Fl...

Mario Vargas Llosa, on the composition of his 1969 novel Conversación en La Catedral, which is set in Peru during the dictatorship of Manue...

I'm climbin' this ladder, My head in the clouds I hope that it matters, I'm havin' my doubts. I'm watchin' the ...

Hiking in the woods in a steady February drizzle is understandably not everyone's idea of fun, but it does have its upside. For one thi...

Miscellaneous midwinter finds. Above, snail shell (untenanted). Below, Trametes betulina, lichen and fungus, frost on woodpecker hole, wil...

Colin Sackett's Uniformagazine is a pamphlet-sized quarterly, published in the UK, that ranges eclectically over various themes, but es...

By longstanding custom, the origins of which are murky, part of every New Year's Eve is devoted to paying social calls on local livesto...

For a guy who has been making records for something like forty-five years and has a long and complicated discography, Peter Blegvad manages ...

Thomas Pynchon: Rachel and Roony sat on a bench in Sheridan Square, talking about Mafia and Paola. It was one in the morning, a wind had ri...

I read this book by the late Stephen Jay Gould shortly after it was published in 1989, and more or less randomly grabbed it off the shelf an...

One year when I was a kid we took a family camping trip to Quebec. I don't remember much about the trip except that we stayed at least a...

Above, and following: headstones in a burial ground on a former estate, now a public park. Below: the de...