On the Moment of ConceptionFrom the Print
We wanted a child but no child came. When Joan suggested the procedure, I wasn’t so sure. It didn’t seem natural…
We wanted a child but no child came. When Joan suggested the procedure, I wasn’t so sure. It didn’t seem natural…
D : He wanted to know who sits on my throne, you know. // D : Who are your influences.
Below, Lewis Carroll explains in few words his nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark.” The letter is addressed to a young girl, May Barber, whom Carroll had befriended when he taught at her mother’s boarding school in 1894. Over … Continued
Below is the letter Emily wrote to her close friend Mary Bowles after her husband Samuel’s death.
J. R. Ackerley writes to Francis King from Thailand, sharing impressions of Bangkok interlaced with grisly, unabashed racism and pretty turns of phrase.
In early 1960, at the behest of the Sunday Times, Rebecca West undertook a three-month tour of South Africa. Below, West—just beginning her stay in South Africa—writes home to her husband Henry Andrews, detailing her impressions of the country and … Continued
Songwriter and novelist Chico Buarque has affected a transition from the Brazilian Bob Dylan to the Brazilian José Saramago or Orhan Pamuk or Gabriel García Márquez. These authors write books where a protagonist’s limp is a metaphor for a country’s crippled left, or a protagonist’s name is a pun about ethnic rivalry…
In “Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin quotes the insight of an anonymous observer of American race relations: “the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men”…
And perhaps true literature (when you “get it”) is something like a disease which one feels in one’s bones, sinews and joints…
A poem and cut-out by Matthea Harvey.