Dreamers Rise

Maritime disasters have long served as inspiration for popular songs and ballads, especially when the drama of the incident is multiplied by...

Last summer I chanced upon an interesting edition of the tale of Reynard the Fox in the free stuff shed in our local dump, and strangely e...

Four stanzas from the medieval Irish legend Buile Suibne , variously translated as The Frenzy of Suibhne or Sweeney Astray : There was a ti...

Has biographer Claire Tomalin slipped up in her account of Little Dorrit ? In Charles Dickens: A Life , she writes Arthur Clennam, the unher...

This may be the first time I've ever hunted down a book based entirely on a phrase that popped into my head. I'd been thinking about...

Van Wyck Brooks: He had a painter's delight in tone. He liked to throw a ghostly glimmer over scenes that he chose b...

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. We found the Thoreau family plot first, and thought that maybe the offerings of writing im...

Three people I used to know fairly well at various times in my life have died this year. One was a childhood friend I hadn't seen since ...

The Czech writer Ivan Klíma has died; the New York Times has a full obit . Klíma has long been a favorite writer of mine, and I revisited a...

A few weeks back Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art posted a passage from Henry Mayhew's The Great World of London in which Mayhew desc...

When I was out walking yesterday morning in one of my regular haunts, keeping an eye out for the deer and rabbits I often see if I arrive...

Nathaniel Hawthorne: One afternoon, he was seized with an irresistible desire to blow soap-bubbles; an amusement, as Hepzibah told Ph...

Amy Liptrot: I never saw myself as, and resist becoming, the wholesome ‘outdoors’ type. But the things I experience keep dragging me in. T...

The founder and former publisher of Black Sparrow Press, John Martin, has died. The Times has a nice obit by Adam Nossiter, who can be forg...

At first glance this is a typical example of the kind of cheap fiction for adolescents that was popular in the early decades of the twentiet...

Celia Thaxter: Boone Island is the forlornest place that can be imagined. The Isles of Shoals, barren as they are, seem like Gardens of Ed...

A cronopio out for a drive spies a cardboard box at the side of the road marked FREE. He stops and investigates. Inside the box are some pot...

A few scenes from today's well-attended and upbeat demonstration in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which merged amicably with a scheduled s...

Someone directed my attention today to this recording from a few years back, which had somehow escaped my notice. Human Geography US presen...

Dalkey Archive Press / Deep Vellum Publishing is re-issuing seven books by Harry Mathews, according to Publishers Weekly , which notes that...