Reading
Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 272 pages; $24. FROM THE DUST JACKET: Open House gathers observations, reminiscences, anecdotes, and …
Just back from Ukraine, I follow TV reports of the election protests in Kiev, the capital. Via e-mail, friends have described the situation in Odessa, where I lived, as much calmer. Odessa is neither in …
Dust of Snow The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heartA change of mood And saved some partOf a day I had rued. …
Christmas letters. I don't know their history, who first wrote one, or where and why. I suspect they began to be written in the I Love Lucy Eisenhower years when all Americans, even though in …
FROM THE DUST JACKET: A cigar-smoking proponent of free-verse modernism in open rebellion against her distinguished Boston lineage, Amy Lowell (1874-1925) cut an indelible public figure. But in the words of editor Honor Moore, "What …
FROM THE DUST JACKET: Jack Kerouac is best known through the image he put forth in his autobiographical novels. Yet it is only in his private journals, in which he catalogued his innermost feelings, that …
Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. Alfred A. Knopf, 2004; 435 pages; $27.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: In an attempt to understand the growing influence of the Christian Right, sociologist and documentary …
FROM THE DUST JACKET: Truman Capote was hailed as one of the most meticulous writers in American letters — a part of the Capote mystique is that his precise writing seemed to exist apart from …
A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004; 208 pages; $20. FROM THE DUST JACKET: While traveling in Calgary, Alberto Manguel was struck by how the …
Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004. 420 pages; $35. Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003 446 pages; $35. FROM THE DUST JACKET: Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003: The poems of Pulitzer Prize-winner …
“I was in Sierra Leone, right next door, and in its history bears the same relationship to England that Liberia bears to the United States. That was when the bodies started piling up in Monrovia.”
"When my mother is in a Newport, Rhode Island, hotel room, I never would have forgotten that. Never. With her in her black sweater with baby powder all over her, looking crazy. She had that little poodle sweater."
In an October 2002 interview he said he had run into the Dalai Lama in the Holy Land. "I went up to him," said LaHaye, "and asked if anyone had ever explained to him who Jesus Christ really is."
There’s three dogs and a cat here, so there’s a zoo-like quality. On most days, Benjamin gets up earlier than I do because he has this farm-boy physiology and I don’t. I’m kind of a sleepaholic.
"Much poetry is arbitrary, obscure, and inaccessible. It makes people feel stupid. That has a great deal to do with Modernism and Post-Modernism, even though many of the Modernists were great poets undeniably."
Frank Doubleday, in Europe at the time Norris bought Dreiser’s novel, on his return home read the manuscript and hated it. Not only did Doubleday not wish to publish it, he thought it filthy and morally wanting.