Eli S. Evans: Is That It

 Satan’s Treasures, Jean Delville,1895 From The Smart Set: There’s a connection between the Devil and the word that goes back to the original Greek diábolos, which means “slanderer” or “accuser.” Bierce knew all too well the demons that lurk in our language. He wrote that the cynic sees things...

From The Times Literary Supplement: Sometimes a person’s most fleeting glance, a throwaway comment, or simply their presence, can become fixed with significance, freeze-framed in the memory like a panel in a comic, there to revisit and linger over. The visual and verbal registers of graphic novels seem well...

I know too – without statistics – that Schubert’s being played in some room there...

Photograph by Omar D by Suzanne Ruta In My Time A Personal and Political Memoir, by Dick Cheney, Threshold Editions: New York, 565 pp. Abduction, by Anouar Benmalek, Arabia Books, Haus Publishing Co: London, 299 pp Dick Cheney’s memoir, In My Time, is self serving, stonewalling and riddled with...

The Finest Life You Ever Saw | by James Salter

The New York Review of Books

From his father, who loved the natural world, Hemingway learned in childhood to fish and shoot, and a love of these things shaped his life along...

Angelina Jolie: Poppy Field (Lusty Spring), David LaChapelle, 2001 From The New York Review of Books: The wit, the utopian vision, and the pornographic utility of House of Holes all arise from the same fact of its fictional universe: no one is ever really shocked. Obscene declarations of desire...

Dawn Treader Book Shop by Nick Rombes I had been working on a long short story, “The Messiah Detective Agency,” when I came across Dana Levin’s book of poems In the Surgical Theatre. This was sometime late in 1999 or early 2000. I was on my way to meet...

Brazilian Landscape, Eizabeth Bishop by Angus Cleghorn After a decade in Brazil, Elizabeth Bishop was offered a $10,000 advance “to provide the text for the Life World Library Brazil, but famously disliked how the editors changed what she wrote” (Bishop: Poems, Prose & Letters viii) in the 1962 volume....

Bird’s eye view of Central Park, New York, John Bachman, 1859 by Katy Layton-Jones Melodramatic Landscapes: Urban Parks in the Nineteenth Century, by Heath Massey Schenker, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 232 pp. At the end of a decade during which urban green space ascended the hierarchy of public and...

Les Murray, David Naseby, 1995 From The New York Review of Books: The New American Poetry both captured and helped to create the spirit of the 1960s. In its first decade it sold a hundred thousand copies; in 1999—by which time half the young rebels it had announced were...