Anecdotal Evidence

Nearly forty years ago I drove to Beaversprite , a nature reserve near Dolgeville in upstate New York, in the foothills of the Adirondacks, ...

Few of us knew of the American poet Catherine Breese Davis (1924-2002). She was a lost soul, little more than a rumor among readers. Her aca...

Isaac Waisberg of IWP Books introduced me to the work of Erwin Chargaff three years ago. Chargaff was a German-born biochemist who fled Hi...

“Every book I read is a not altogether negligible portion of my lifetime reading. Why did I not follow a careful program? Why did I give fre...

“By all accounts,” writes Erik Bader, “[Guy Davenport] wrote a legit stack of letters every single day, and would respond to literally anyo...

As the human world seems to grow more chaotic, as though entropy were finally triumphant, I look for evidence of pattern and design in natur...

“I believe that it behooves the living, for our own sake, to keep the memory of the dead alive and vivid . . .”   That’s William Maxwell i...