Anecdotal Evidence

As an obstinately monolingual American, I rely on the precious work of translators. The three poets I read most often in translation, in ord...

Among Clive James’ books, perhaps the least read is Gate of Lilacs (Picador, 2016), a book of poems mostly about Marcel Proust and James’ i...

Can a congenital pessimist reject the notion of an imminent apocalypse, a collapse of all that Western Civilization has accomplished? Sure, ...

I spent Thursday morning in the hospital having a nuclear stress test performed. It’s a painless, time-consuming procedure made pleasant by ...

I don’t remember old people complaining about being old when I was a kid. It might have been joked about in passing but I recall little indu...

I recently learned that an acquaintance had lost his job and my reflexive reaction was to laugh. The people I was with were offended. How co...

Irresistible title: “Books That Have Hindered Me.” The opening of Agnes Repplier’s essay is a fair sample of her prose and her genteelly cau...