That was heavy freight moved through last night, and has been moving through since I’m back, settled in again by the Hudson at the Hotel Oneira: maps on the walls, shelves of blue and white...
Anxiety about identity stands in for actual drama in Nathan Englander’s ‘corny’ stories.
Fifty years ago, Walter Ong startled classicists with the proposal that learning Latin offered medieval and Renaissance boys a rite of passage not unlike Bushman puberty rites. Torn from the...
Why Proust killed his mother but wished he’d killed his father.
A cloud blew up and like that: OK fun’s fun but we’ve got issues, to wait until tomorrow. At least that’s what I heard, a kind of rushing as of water over steep slabs. More ants...
A newly discovered short story, written in French in 1842 for Constantin Heger.
Lysander Rief, the hero of Waiting for Sunrise, arrives in Vienna in 1913 to undergo psychoanalysis, and stays there for a few months; after his final session he goes to a café, where he...
On Tuesday, 17 October 1911, 18-year-old Rudolf Ditzen, the future Hans Fallada, got up before dawn to meet his schoolfriend Hanns Dietrich von Necker at a tourist spot outside Rudolstadt in...
Adrienne Rich’s new poems show qualities that almost require the label ‘late style’. They are made up of fragments, careless of finish and of audience. In technique, as well as...
On Saturday, July 30, Dr Johnson and I took a sculler at the Temple-stairs, and set out for Greenwich. I asked him if he really thought a knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages an essential...
Most Valuable, Most Improved, and for least valuable unimprovables, the Spirit Award. Skinny in my T-back, I got Most Valuables. Swimming mostly hurt. My shoulders are still big from this....
In its winter issue of 1960, Epoch, a quarterly published at Cornell, carried ‘The River Jordan’, a story by ‘Donald R. DeLillo’. It tells of a day in the life of Emil...
2 January 2004. By mid-afternoon I was chasing cage fever so wrapped up in several layers of clothing – leaving barely any flesh exposed to a riving wind – threw on a backpack and...
In this podcast Denise Riley reads ‘A Part Song’. The full text is available for subscribers. i You principle of song, what are you for now Perking up under any spasmodic light To...
At My Father’s Funeral The idea that the body as well as the soul was immortal was probably linked on to a very primitive belief regarding the dead, and one shared by many peoples, that...
Zombies, thousands of them. At the movies, on TV, in computer games, on Facebook, roaming the streets in protest or for kicks, the undead hordes have never been more prevalent. They’re a...
It’s impossible to overstate the extent to which the game of baseball is integrated with American life in general, and its literary scene in particular. The sport’s popularity has...
He always comes on his own, this bachelor of antiquarian tastes. Sometimes he is a book dealer, more often an academic. He is a dry, crotchety character, not particularly sympathetic. He is...