Dreamers Rise

Tobias Smollett's novels have been on my list of things to get around to reading, so when I found this edition of The Expedition of Hump...

I first studied Spanish in junior high school. There were, as I remember, four languages you could select: French, Spanish, German, and Lati...

The former Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski died on February 20th at the age of eighty-nine. Mazeroski, who retired as a pla...

In 1967, Gabriel García Márquez and several other Latin American writers concocted a plan for a volume in which each participant would under...

Two recent publishing events revisit the phenomenon of the so-called Latin American literary "Boom" of the 1960s, in particular hi...

The city is behind me. In daylight, with no lights visible, the wind and the breakers cutting off all sound, one might think it uninhabited,...

Scenes from a student-led anti-ICE demonstration in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, February 3, 2026. The demonstration began with a scheduled wa...

In the 1980s, with his international reputation secured, Gabriel García Márquez agreed to write a series of brief syndicated essays that app...

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...