Friendship in Fiction

In philosophical treatments of friendship, it can often be elevated to the highest form of human relationships, even if its perfect form is rare...
Read MoreGeorge Orwell on bookshops

When I worked in a second-hand bookshop the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people...
Read MoreThomas Travisano on Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop explored Brazil extensively, making trips down the Amazon, traversing the tropical rainforest with Aldous Huxley...
Read More‘Why was I making so many cups of tea?’

It couldn’t possibly be that I was actually missing the ebb and flow of office life, could it?
Read More(Parentheses are outward-looking); “quotation is inward-looking”

A parenthetical phrase (like this one) may refer to things outside of it, parts of the sentence it inhabits (say)...
Read MoreMore than Heavenly Bliss by Andre Gerard

Important as the soup is in To the Lighthouse it is never identified, never seen as “beautiful red soup” or “eternal” tomato soup...
Read MoreDouglas Penick on David Jones

At the time of the dooms in the third quarter of the Reaper’s Moon, in the island of Britain...
Read MoreThe YA serial came into its own in the 1980s…

If Christopher Pike’s YA novels were sold out at my local Crown Books, I was faced with the choice of either Sweet Valley High or The Baby-Sitters Club...
Read MoreGurped Out

On any given day, walking around the yard, one was almost certain to hear one prisoner ask another, “Hey, man, got any gurps?” I knew it had something to do with drugs...
Read MorePeter Pans

Who or what is Peter Pan? Peter stands for a deep psychological desire in all of us to return to childhood and escape into an earlier, freer state of being...
Read MoreMore Absurdity Than Logic

Don’t we go to literature to find the logic that might displace the absurdity of our lives?
Read MoreThe New Zhdanovshchina

This new world of ours, structured by the internet, is unrelentingly violent, as it is inimical to human freedom and human thriving...
Read MoreFar Sparklers

Tonight I walked under the stars through the snow & stopped & looked at my far sparklers & heard the voice of the wind so slight & pure & deep as if it were the sound of the stars themselves revolving...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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