October 31, 2025 – "That bungalow was where I first read Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place—a chorus of a novel about a small ...

A crate full of chain falls got delivered. It was a glorious crate, made of sanded spruce. I unscrewed some of the planking ...

Jan Kerouac’s darker and more extreme brand of mischief make her father’s On the Road high jinks seem tame and even a tad ...

Five weeks after Fort Sumter, the official starting point of the war, Ellsworth’s Fire Zouaves received the command to sail ...

For a long time, Edward P. Jones has been one of the two or three writers most important to me. When I teach his stories, ...

Antique friendly robot. Photograph by Thomas Quine, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Read the first ...

All through the twenty years I knew you your new poems surprised. Unexpected colors, new materials. David Hockney comes to ...

September 23, 2025 – “After a while English departs and you find yourself in a realm.” ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

I tend not to think that stuff other people think is obvious is obvious. Everyone feels like they have some sense of Frost. Everyone knows a poem or two. That kind of overexposure lends an aspect of ...

Franz Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” might be retitled “Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog.” In any event, Kafka did not assign a title to the story, which he left unpublished and ...

“Literature is pleasure and knowledge, like sex. It’s useful only so long as one doesn’t set out to make it useful.” ...