October 31, 2025 – "That bungalow was where I first read Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place—a chorus of a novel about a small ...

A crate full of chain falls got delivered. It was a glorious crate, made of sanded spruce. I unscrewed some of the planking ...

Jan Kerouac’s darker and more extreme brand of mischief make her father’s On the Road high jinks seem tame and even a tad ...

For a long time, Edward P. Jones has been one of the two or three writers most important to me. When I teach his stories, ...

Antique friendly robot. Photograph by Thomas Quine, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. Read the first ...

September 23, 2025 – “After a while English departs and you find yourself in a realm.” ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

I tend not to think that stuff other people think is obvious is obvious. Everyone feels like they have some sense of Frost. Everyone knows a poem or two. That kind of overexposure lends an aspect of ...

Franz Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” might be retitled “Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog.” In any event, Kafka did not assign a title to the story, which he left unpublished and ...

“Literature is pleasure and knowledge, like sex. It’s useful only so long as one doesn’t set out to make it useful.” ...

Anthe (ಅಂತೆ) is one of my favorite words in the Kannada language. Somewhat meaningless by itself, it adds so much nuance and emotion when appended to a sentence that we Kannadigas cannot carry on a ...

I once saw a Lego metaphor for translation. On some online forum somewhere. that you have purchased the Hogwarts Castle Lego set. You have given up the dining room table for this project. You get ...