Anecdotal Evidence

“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...

The late Victor Brombert writes in The Pensive Citadel (University of Chicago Press, 2023):   “[T]here is a rarer, quite precious experie...

Kafka somewhere says that impatience is a form of laziness. I would add that it’s also a form of egotism, a presumption that our clocks ough...

I’m reading another book by C.E. Montague , a collection of travel essays, The Right Place: A Book of Pleasures (Chatto & Windus, 1924)...

For the first time, my youngest son, working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru, recommended a book for me to read. It was a novel written b...