Andre Gerard’s Alpine Gamble

The art work in fiction is less likely to be the basis for some epiphany than to be a MacGuffin...

Paris wasn’t then what it is now...

To experience a version of the cool exhilaration of a mid-twentieth-century American jazz night, one might start by listening to an iconic Miles Davis recording...

Did Marinetti's visit to Argentina contribute to the spread of Fascism?

It is the Donkey’s acceptance and internalisation of the judgement from on high that is so shockingly modern as it prefigures the mentality of victims in witch hunts, show trials, struggle sessions and other kinds of brain washing...

It seems there are some writers who teach you how to write and there are others who teach you what to write about...

Michael Pietsch and David Foster Wallace’s collaboration on Infinite Jest highlights the intervenient role of the editor as the mediator between the author and the reader, or the author and the publisher...

We find ourselves in New Hampshire, or Mexico, driving about, or at home, and writing and thinking ahead...

I don’t catch Phillis Wheatley’s joke at first...

Who knew that William Bankes was an amateur of Thomas Love Peacock! Perhaps I should have...

I’d pounce on the British music newspapers, the NME and Melody Maker...

Marcel Proust represents many things. Chief among these perhaps, especially for non-French readers, is quantity...

I 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...

I’ve always loved Jim Harrison’s poetry—so full of itself, so direct and hungry and angered and awed...

From the bridge, I go back, usually, through Babelsberg. I pass flocks of ducks trustingly swimming up to the shore. Above, on a small hill—the palace...

A taste for rural scenes, in the present state of society, appears to be very often an artificial sentiment, rather inspired by poetry and romances, than a real perception of the beauties of nature...

A house down around the block is getting a new roof, hammers echoing like giant flickers. Since the big virus outbreak...

Affiliation is a geography of bleeding boundaries and abrupt junctures...

I was twenty years and thirty days old when that bomb went off in downtown Bogotá...