Anecdotal Evidence

Magazines have long been fond of asking well-known writers to recommend books appropriate to certain times of year, usually as Christmas gif...

Left in a hefty anthology titled The Faber Book of War Poetry (ed. Kenneth Baker, 1996) was a postcard from O’Gara & Wilson, Ltd. Books...

One needn’t be a fetishist or even a book collector – reader is close enough -- to prize an “association copy,” a term neatly defined here :...

In 1899, Edwin Arlington Robinson read Thoreau’s Walking , a work based on an 1851 lecture published posthumously in 1862. Robinson was not ...

Grownups seldom credit children with insight into human psychology, thus treating them as smaller, more annoying versions of themselves. My ...

A friend called to chat while driving to Dallas to visit her mother. My friend is my age. Her mother is ninety-six years old. She lives on h...

Eugenio Montale speaking with an interviewer, American poet W.S. Di Piero, in 1973:   “Political ideas are best expressed in prose. Why sh...