Every evening dries on a roof of tar, and the screens twang under the weight of bugs in a place not yet given to me. Metaphor doesn't mediate our understanding of the world; we take what comes. Cars in the late night and screams from children are linked to appetite, and make me fear for…
I little knew the turbulent time which lay ahead of me when on the telephone my friend Margaret Lane invited me, subject to the consent of the Chinese authorities, to join a little party including herself and her husband for a month's visit to China in April 1957. It was during that deceptively hopeful season…
What's A Story Mary Ward Brown Rosellen Brown Robert Cohen Carol Cosman Louise Glück Brenda Hillman Rhoda Huffey Jeff Hush August Kleinzahler Phillip Lopate Thomas McGuane Sue Miller Oscar Pemantle Mary Peterson Edgar Poma C. E. Poverman David Reid Danny Romero Roger Salloch Jean-Paul Sartre Gary Soto Edited by Leonard Michaels ISSN 0048-4474
Over the years I have developed a distaste for the spectacle of joie de vivre, the knack of knowing how to live. Not that I disapprove of all hearty enjoyment of life. A flushed sense of happiness can overtake a person anywhere, and one is no more to blame for it than the Asiatic flu…
In 1862, Flaubert recalls for the Goncourts the beginnings of his liaison with Louise: “He told us the story of his coupling with Colet, initiated in a drive home in a carriage, painting himself as playing the role of someone disgusted with life, of the dark, handsome stranger, of the suicidal romantic, which so amused…
When V. S. Naipaul was a toddler growing up in Trinidad, his grandmother sold marijuana. Only old people bought it, for, during the early 1930s in Trinidad, only the elderly, whose energies were depleted and for whom life had become boring, desired to smoke hemp. Naipaul told this story to his students at Wesleyan University…
. . . A couple of thousand men scattered throughout the great European cities. A few of them are famous; a few write unusually arid, consciously frightening and still peculiarly moving and gripping books; a few, shy and proud, write only letters, which will be found fifty or sixty years later and preserved as moral…
A traditional theological question asks why God allows there to be evil in the world. I shall consider some untraditional answers. While for the religious this problem is a pressing one, the non-religious too can find it interesting, or at least a challenging intellectual exercise. The "problem of evil" is set up by the fact…
trans. Chinese Robin D.S. Yeates Born between 834 and 836, Wei Chuang lived through the bloody collapse of the T'ang dynasty, which had witnessed the first great flowering of the art of poetry in China. He lost almost all the verse he had composed in the first fifty years of his life when, on January…
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