Dreamers Rise

One summer evening about twenty years ago I left work at rush hour and joined a line of backed-up traffic using the on-ramp to merge onto th...

The Memphis Jug Band was a shifting collection of African-American musicians that recorded some 70 or 80 sides of music between 1927 and 193...

Because nothing says "Christmas" like owls on velocipedes.

Phoebe Hearst didn't care for her son's taste in women. Throughout his adult life, the media magnate William Randolph Hearst had a t...

First Second Books in the US has released the first authorized English-language translation of Hayao Miyazaki's 1983 full-color manga S...

My favorite Booth cartoon, this one didn't appear in the New Yorker but in the business section of the New York Times , accompanying an...

I'm standing on a great plain with no trees or buildings in sight, and I notice a faint hum of engine noise. I look up. Airplanes or air...

This was not a dream, although it seemed a bit like one at the time. On a beautiful fall afternoon I drove a few miles to one of my favorite...

About twenty years ago or maybe a little more, my wife and I went to a small music club called the Towne Crier , which at that time was loca...

I enjoyed this seasonally appropriate 1960 Mexican film directed by Roberto Gavaldón, with cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa. Macario is b...

The grass may not always be greener, but with mushrooms it seems to be a different story. It's been a dreadful year for fungi-spotting ...

The narrator of this novel by the elusive writer who called himself B. Traven is one Gerard Gales, an American seaman who oversleeps while ...

I've been assigned to escort a famous poet to a public reading in Princeton, New Jersey. We are to meet in Grand Central Station before ...

It's been another unpredictable year in the squash patch. The acorn squash that I planted in the wake of last year's profusion of ...

Before the former child star Olivia Rorschach sets off on one of her frequent trips, she leaves instructions for her au pair, Jane Sutton, ...

When I first read this 1978 novel by Georges Perec in David Bellos's translation years ago I recall being entertained but also perhaps a...

Georges Perec: Sometimes Valène dreamt of cataclysms and tempests, of whirlwinds that would carry the whole house off like a wisp of straw...

In 1975 I took a course taught by a folklorist who had a parallel career as the producer of a number of commercial recordings of folk music....

Georges Perec: She’d have done better to sell up and go back to the farm where she’d been born. Rabbits and chickens, some tomato plants, ...