26 November (1935): Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig
“If you don’t come till January, I fear you’ll only find me half alive. The Christmas holidays in particular I will NOT be able to survive. You can have no idea how much I dread them…”
“If you don’t come till January, I fear you’ll only find me half alive. The Christmas holidays in particular I will NOT be able to survive. You can have no idea how much I dread them…”
Sculpture and ceramicist Mario Sturani was, by all accounts, Cesare Pavese‘s most cherished friend. The two met as students, and maintained a frank, intimate and wide-ranging correspondence long thereafter. Below, Pavese writes to Sturani of his terrible, lifelong depression, and … Continued
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“The idea I did try to express is perhaps sound enough, that the protection we must always seek is that inner laughter…that is to say, I presume, to try to take it also as a part of the total picture, this damn fascinating thing…life.”
Below, Pushkin reaches out to fellow poet F. N. Glinka, regarding the latter’s failure to take part in a “poetic memorial feast” for Anton Delvig, a close friend of Pushkin’s and publisher of the journal Northern Flowers. Glinka had reason to … Continued
[FLOOR] In the foyer: a walnut floor. The cracks near the door create a triangular pattern. There are water scars at the foot of the stairs. I scrape cobwebs from the baseboards with a dull knife. … Continued
In the letter below, Edmund Wilson writes to John Lester, his former professor, thanking him for his instruction in “the architectonics of prose,” and criticizing the sloppiness of “a good deal of American writing.” November 20, 1950, Cape Cod Dear … Continued
Alfred Hitchcock and Vladimir Nabokov were mutual admirers; for a brief time, they maintained a correspondence, in which they batted around the idea of collaborating on a film. Below, Hitchcock writes to Nabokov, offering two ideas for potential screenplays. “Screenplay … Continued
On November 13th, 1936, Thomas Wolfe wrote an angry, hurt, agonized-over dispatch to Maxwell Perkins, in which the novelist effectively severed ties with his longtime editor and mentor—whom he accused of “[trying] to exert, at no expense to oneself, such … Continued
Below, Charles Bukowski writes to the editors of The L.A. Free Press, defending a story he had published in their pages two weeks prior. The story—”a take-off on an interview with an established female poet in a recent issue of … Continued