Anecdotal Evidence

Two poets seldom linked came together in the New York Times on September 8, 1912. The writer was Joyce Kilmer, known forever as the author ...

Over the weekend I read a book review full of enthusiastic approval that was so poorly written, anything the critic had to say was immediate...

It’s a commonplace to say you can read a serious reader’s autobiography on his bookshelves. For some of us you can say the same of the libra...

The most casually intelligent person I have ever known was D.G. Myers , who died on this date, September 26, in 2014. I prize intelligence b...

“My first novel, Bright Center of Heaven , is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired. In a symposium at Smith College, Saul Bel...

The first stanza of C.H. Sisson’s “The Red Admiral” ( Exactions , 1980):   “The wings tremble, it is the red admiral Ecstatically agains...

Clive James in his essay on Louis Armstrong in Cultural Amnesia (2007):   “[F]or the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot fro...