Help. Me.

There was a period of my life when, though I defined myself as a reader and a writer, the words I was consuming weren’t what anyone would recognize as having literary merit.

There can be comparatively little question that the place ordinarily occupied by dreams in literature is peculiarly unreal and unsatisfying. When the hero tells us that "last night he dreamed a dream"...

Thirty-Seven Pages by Shane Jesse Christmass

A while ago, someone on Facebook was selling books. I purchased a few titles by Alfred Jarry and Edouard Leve. This was years ago.

You could look very hard in Purleigh and not find any physical evidence of the Tolstoyan anarchist community that was founded there in 1897...

As the reading crisis spreads its tangential wings to include newspapers pruning peripheral departments, some semi-pro and pro writers are forced back into an amateur spirit...

Question: Looking back on your life in 2018, what do you see?

I’ve no photograph of my great-grandfather’s brother, Peter Simon, the Hungarian tailor who was imprisoned by Cossacks and sent to a Siberian prison-camp.

There are epochs of history which their enemies call rude and which their friends call simple. My difficulty is that they seem to me not simple, but subtle.

Seven grills, one boil and a cold lunch or two…

On January 2, 1840, Dickens wrote to his printers, Bradbury and Evans, to thank them for their annual Christmas gift of a turkey. He chose his words with care...

My Dear Susie Clemens, I have received and read all the letters which you and your little sister have written me... I can read your and your baby sister's jagged and fantastic marks without any trouble at all...

What could be more relaxing than to take a holiday? From the start I knew that the word was a bit of a lie, since it wasn’t really a vacation

“These German Romantics and their thinly veiled asceticism!”

All writing is personal. How could it be otherwise? People spend what is most precious—their lives—doing it.

The mail-coach, as the national organ for publishing these mighty events, thus diffusively influential, became itself a spiritualised and glorified object to an impassioned heart...

What To Expect When You’re Expecting Revolution

Sandberg had covered for the firm as it, among other ethical offenses, employed a Republican opposition-research that used the time-honored anti-Semitic dog whistle...

Biography as Novel: A Look at Cavafy in Love

Constantine P. Cavafy’s sexuality (1863-1933) was a paradox. While he composed daring homoerotic verse, he wrote very little about his own erotic life.

When I think of technology, of thinking about technology, I recall Norman O. Brown, Marshall McLuhan and John Cage. Jessica mentions none of them...

“I have not read this author’s books, and if I have read them I have forgotten what they were about.” These words are reported as having been uttered in our midst..

The other day a card arrived: a picture of mother, father, and child, teeth bared, cheeks pulsing with fresh blood. The baby looks more like him, with that nearly translucent-white skin.

While writing my master’s thesis on DeLillo’s Underworld, I reached a strange level of intimacy with the book.

Scott Manley Hadley: My Father, From A Distance

My father is slowly dying of Parkinson’s disease, and has been for over ten years. I have never been close to him, and now I never will be...

Animal Spirits at the Nueva Burdalesa Bakery by Jessica Sequeira

A few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world. I lived in the tiny room of a pension on B----- street. Funds were running low.

I was eighteen years old when I was introduced to the fascinating world of Alasdair Gray. I read Poor Things (1992) in the second year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow,

It’s easiest to start from the impulse to problematize the position of the flâneur. The ugly word privilege hovers around it, and we turn to questions that we know the answer to, “Who, exactly, is allowed to wander, like so?”

‘Poem of Philosophical and Parental Conundrums Written In An Election Year’

From the backseat, Jude saying, Mama, I HATE Republicans, and the way he says HATE, saying it the way only a seven-year-old can.

That Diana and the Amazons speak ‘hundreds’ of languages is believable, given their situation and seeming enlightenment; that English becomes their go-to choice for daily chats off the Greek coast, less so.

On the ancient river, seagull rock crests out of the waters. An outcrop within its sight is thorned by a few young silhouettes, taking turns plunging into the river some feet below. Riverboats and water taxis, white river cruise-ships weave short and cyclical tours between the two shores.

Colin Raff: Variations on a Brandenburg Salamander

In the spring of 1793, the entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst, as a means to supplement his lectures at the newly founded Berliner Tierarzneischule

A few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world. I lived in the tiny room of a pension on B----- street. Funds were running low.

I was eighteen years old when I was introduced to the fascinating world of Alasdair Gray. I read Poor Things (1992) in the second year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow,

From the backseat, Jude saying, Mama, I HATE Republicans, and the way he says HATE, saying it the way only a seven-year-old can.

In the spring of 1793, the entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst, as a means to supplement his lectures at the newly founded Berliner Tierarzneischule

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