Dreamers Rise

I pulled out this slender letterpress chapbook the other day when I was looking for something else. I had forgotten that I owned it. The cov...

Sir James George Frazer: Not only among the Celts but throughout Europe, Hallowe’en, the night which marks the transition from autumn to...

It's a frightening thought that I've reached an age where there are now books that I first read almost fifty years ago, and I'm...

A posh tour bus pulls up outside our house and discharges a group of North Koreans and American supporters, who barge in through our front d...

Charles Dickens: The passengers were landing from the packet on the pier at Calais. A low-lying place and a low-spirited place Calais wa...

Most of this year's butternut squash crop has now been harvested. I grew two types, both of which are hybrids. The tan ones shown above ...

This novel set in a fictitious Eastern European country was published in 1983, that is, the year after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, but sup...

A Josef Škvorecký novella set in wartime Czechoslovakia led me to this droll 1985 BBC documentary about the bass saxophone and its players,...

And some books are just not meant for one ... I picked up The Idiot because I was more or less housebound for a few days and tired of dippi...

Our dog came upon this large Chinese praying mantis in our yard this morning in incriminating circumstances. The mantis was on the ground di...

The gifted songwriter and performer Nanci Griffith has died at the age of 68. Here she is in her prime, with a lovely live version of one of...

One day I hope to retire to grow the vegetable marrows, but until then I have only the window box. — Hercule Poirot Il faut cultiver not...

I admit it: I'm a squash obsessive. Not so much summer squash, which actually don't grow that well for me these days, but the winter...

Eduardo Halfon: I had never been to Japan before. And I had never been asked to be a Lebanese writer. A Jewish writer, yes. A Guatemalan wri...

I'm not sure why this genial live recording stayed on ice for twenty-seven years — maybe the timing just wasn't right until now — bu...

Jazz criticism is well outside my area of competence, nor have I made any effort to keep abreast of contemporary developments in the genre, ...

This little magazine edited by Bob Callahan had a brief run of five numbers in the 1970s; there was one double issue (2-3). It was published...

Lafcadio Hearn: She could swim like a Tahitian, and before daybreak on sultry summer mornings often stole down to the river to strike out...

The story of the adventures of the Irish abbot St. Brendan or Brenainn was a popular one in the middle ages, with a substantial number of ma...

I was predisposed to like Richard Thompson's new memoir (published by Algonquin Books in the US and Faber in the UK) because I've ...