Dreamers Rise

I found a copy of this chapbook on the giveaway shelf in our local library and brought it home, knowing only that the author, Derek Mahon,...

A quick hopscotch from Sonny Rollins to Lope de Vega and back again. When I think of Sonny Rollins the first thing that comes to mind isn...

Fourteen years ago, during a week in Iceland, I visited the Listasafn Íslands (National Gallery of Iceland), which was then housing an exhib...

It's become a bit of a commonplace in contemporary natural history memoirs that the subject can't only be the natural world; there h...

Henry Fielding: Booth, as the reader may be pleased to remember, was a pretty good master of the classics; for his father, though he desig...

Thomas Keightley: "Another wonderful thing," says Ralph of Coggeshall, "happened in Suffolk, at St. Mary's of the Wolf-...

I found this tiny red eft in the street in front of our house one rainy morning a few days ago. It was torpid and I didn't much like its...

I've probably read Jorge Luis Borges's short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" at least a half-dozen times over the years...

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...