Cancer carried off his cherished wife as Florida floundered in a freak harsh freeze and let the fahrenheit out of his life never to gain back its lost degrees. He still can’t quite believe...
If you open a road atlas at Ontario, you can see that the roads charted by the thin red and blue lines of Huron County, adhere to the geometry and history of acreage, drawing rectangles in a...
The Theban poet Pindar (c.520-446 BC), though he wrote much else, is principally known for his magnificent odes, known as epinicians, in praise of athletic victories by aristocrats and tyrants,...
The Black Garden The first thing I did was imagine a circle and get in it. Then I paid my bills and coughed up some neutrinos. Things seemed to be going my way. Outside the circle the world...
Postcard Ciao bella! we’re near this stretch of Emerald Coast, but the sea view’s even better: soon as we landed S whisked us off on his motoscafo Magnum for an eyeful. I see how he...
One day, María de las Nieves Moran, the heroine of Francisco Goldman’s The Divine Husband, unexpectedly receives a letter from a woman who had, many years earlier, been her fellow...
Standing on the deck of the sinking Lusitania, the American theatrical manager Charles Frohman spoke his last words. ‘Why fear death?’ he was heard to say. ‘It is the most...
Dryden and D’Avenant’s debonair travesty of The Tempest pairs the innocent heroine, Dorinda, with Hippolito, a male juvenile lead of equal springtime guilelessness. While Miranda...
We’re encouraged by the Romantics and the Freudians to think that childhood is when we are most ‘natural’ and least broken-in to cultural norms. However, in childhood we are...
Mia Couto is a white Mozambican who writes in Portuguese, perhaps the most prominent of his generation of writers – he is 50 this year – in Lusophone Africa. His recurring theme is...
That’s me ninety-four. If we are celebrating I’ll take a large Drambuie, many thanks, and then I’ll have a small one every evening for the next six years. After that –...
Imagining the worst is no talisman against it. * My time here has afforded me no enlightenment; though my night-vision has improved enormously. In fact it seems to have evolved as if it were...
I love starting things * Fat and shadow, oil and wax, mobility solidified, like cooled grease in a can – * Seeing how far I can go * Analiese said,...
‘Johnson wrote The Lives of the Poets,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning grumbled, ‘and left out the poets.’ She exaggerated, of course, but a book of that title which omitted...
As Dashiell Hammett once pointed out, murders, even in fiction, are not like mathematical problems. This hasn’t, however, prevented plenty of other crime writers from treating them as if...
The heroes of Albert Camus’s books can be quite annoying: surly, self-dramatising Hamlets who like to think of themselves as strong, silent loners, wise to human folly. But although they...
What the Horses See at Night When the day-birds have settled in their creaking trees, the doors of the forest open for the flitting drift of deer among the bright croziers of new ferns and the...
Using literature as a way out of your life carries less of a stigma than lager or Grand Theft Auto. It’s understood as a mark of educated cultivation, not wilful indulgence or evasion. Yet...