Mandakini Pachauri in Vienna

I first arrived here from India three long decades ago late...
Read MoreSerious Kailyarding

During its wildly popular late-nineteenth-century pomp, Kailyard literature (so-named for a cabbage patch) was characterized by sentimental depictions of rural Scottish folk in all their close-knit charm...
Read MoreLilith: On Love, Living and Meritocracy

My father once said, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” It is taken from Love Story, a 1970 movie based on the novel of the same name...
Read MoreEd Simon: John Donne and Social Isolation

Late in 1623, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London fell ill with fever and had difficulty breathing. At 51 years of age, the poet and priest John Donne...
Read MoreEli S. Evans: The Writer vs. the Pandemic III

Constant specter of illness and death, increasing likelihood of unemployment, nail in the coffin of the post-World War II order.
Read MoreMarian Janssen on Elizabeth Bishop

Thomas Travisano paints a structured, sensitive portrait of Bishop. He is at his best when explaining her work, which he immaculately interweaves with her life.
Read MoreEmile Bojesen and Ansgar Allen: Agamben and Techno-Fascism

Professors who switch to teaching online are the ‘perfect equivalent of the university teachers who in 1931 swore allegiance to the Fascist regime’. So says Giorgio Agamben...
Read MoreWith a Care

I came to realize in a series of waves the enormous impact this pandemic would have on the domestic workforce. The first was quite early on, before the travel ban, school closures, and state shutdowns.
Read MoreStay Sileni

In Titian’s early 16th century painting, as Meis reads it, the somnolent Silenus, who echoes the alert god’s posture as he is carried behind him by his followers...
Read MoreClose Reading Bob Dylan by Ed Simon

Temperamentally conservative poetry critic David Lehman chose only one lyric by Bob Dylan to include in his 2006 The Oxford Book of American Poetry.
Read MoreJanice Lee: After Benny

When I was a child, I didn't see the connection between dreams and life the way I do now. I didn’t see the way that parallel realities influence each other...
Read MoreJane Rosenberg LaForge: Spring Without Witness

This spring has arrived with a disturbing similarity, behind the storm and soundproof windows of my New York apartment. Jesus rises, Jews are delivered...
Read MoreJessica Sequeira: Two Augurs

Archaic, oracular and paradoxical , inspired by studies of occult philosophy yet destined for a wider readership unacquainted with these currents , this collection of poems by Olga Acevedo
Read MoreEd Simon: VE Day 75 Years Later

If the lesson from World War II can’t be that the Allies were unassailably good, it can still be that the Axis was unambiguously evil.
Read MoreEmily Ogden: Mind Games

A Greek soldier once said to me on a private bunk in a ferry boat, “You are a good whore.” Well, I mean to say. This was absurd. I had bedded him.
Read MoreQuaintspace

By the time many writers were ready to seriously engage with surveillance capitalism, it had already redescribed their profession, along with the world.
Read MoreWho is free from Melancholy?

Melancholy is a condition unsuited to a pandemic. Like ennui, it is an ailment born of stability. The strong light of catastrophe withers it.
Read MoreCam Scott on Robert Glück

“In the 1430s, Margery Kempe wrote the first autobiography in English. She replaced existence with the desire to exist,” writes Robert Glück...
Read MoreAnandi Mishra: The Self in Quarantine

I was just wetting my toes into the sands of self-isolation in Delhi, when a putrid smell came along, an estrangement within another estrangement.
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost. The ghost for me.
Read MoreIf duende, the source of inspiration that Lorca sets out to champion in his essay at the expense of the Muse, is “in sum, the spirit of the earth”, a force linking body and soil through a struggle akin to death, then the Muse is a force that speaks to the head and inspires art that is, in the words’ most negative senses, cerebral and high-minded.
Read MoreBurton was born in Kentucky. He moved itinerantly before settling in Oakland. Temperatures rise, so does the suicide rate.
Read MoreI’ve been writing a more or less monthly memoir of my life in the sixties and seventies when I lived with Doris Lessing, and my continuing relationship with her until her death last year at 94. It is also an ongoing portrait of my incurable cancer.
Read MoreThe cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost. The ghost for me.
Read MoreIf duende, the source of inspiration that Lorca sets out to champion in his essay at the expense of the Muse, is “in sum, the spirit of the earth”, a force linking body and soil through a struggle akin to death, then the Muse is a force that speaks to the head and inspires art that is, in the words’ most negative senses, cerebral and high-minded.
Read MoreBurton was born in Kentucky. He moved itinerantly before settling in Oakland. Temperatures rise, so does the suicide rate.
Read MoreI’ve been writing a more or less monthly memoir of my life in the sixties and seventies when I lived with Doris Lessing, and my continuing relationship with her until her death last year at 94. It is also an ongoing portrait of my incurable cancer.
Read MoreThe cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers...
Read More