Anecdotal Evidence

In 1995, R.L. Barth published the chapbook Samuel Johnson: Selected Latin Poems Translated by Various Hands , with contributions by ten poet...

I remember one afternoon as a boy while in the neighbor’s back yard falling in love with the word of . A common preposition suddenly seemed ...

“He is almost as important to me as Shakespeare, and I think of him almost as the second most important writer in English, absurd as that mi...

“H-hour, 0800. Long jets of red flame mixed with thick black smoke rushed out of the muzzles of the huge battleships’ 16-inch guns with a no...

While looking for nothing I found a genuine curiosity: an interview with Tom Wolfe focused on poetry. The interview was conducted in 2011, s...

In 1848, James Russll Lowell published the book-length poem A Fable for Critics . It’s the work of a cocky young man. Lowell was twenty-eigh...

If pushed to choose my favorite literary form, I would reluctantly reject novels and aphorisms and settle on the essay which, in the right h...

I’m skeptical of prophecy, weighing even the scriptural sort against the evidence and the suitability of the prophet. People tend to concur ...

“The futurists claim that the book as we know it will disappear, like that magician’s egg, and that it will be replaced by ‘electronic data ...

“Until recently, I considered David Copperfield to be the best English-language novel I’d read. No longer. This side of Tolstoy, I know of ...

My review of Vasily Grossman’s From the Front Line: Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin (New York Review Books, 2026) is published in the Fall iss...

In his Spectator essay for January 15, 1712 , Joseph Addison tells us he spent the day with friends, “an Assembly of Virtuosos,” one of whom...

In 1939, Louise Bogan reviewed for The New Yorker new poetry collections by Archibald MacLeish and Muriel Rukeyser. Her review opens with a...

It was probably the first wildflower I learned to identify. (It always seemed important to know the names of things.) It grew, never densely...

“Style means the necessary word. The rest matters little.”   I sometimes conduct an informal test on a piece of prose that either pleases ...

“The words you see are all there is worth seeing.”   Adagia are maxims, proverbs, the root of our current word, adage . It entered Englis...