The poems of C. P. Cavafy, even when fragmentary or incomplete, have a stamp of finality about them; they seem permanently incised, like inscriptions recovered from antiquity. The same cannot be said of Cavafy's prose. His essays and reflections are restless, hesitant, darting. That makes them all
How is it that the Internet was inevitable but the iPhone was not? Both are part of what tech guru Kevin Kelly calls the "technium: the ecosystem of our technologies, an extension of biological evolution, a force that crystallized ten thousand years ago when "our ability to modify the biosphere
Between the start of the First World War and the aftermath of the Second, a small group of American intellectuals began to search for new answers to the question of what makes us human. They were no more than a dozen at the start, outsiders in one way or another—secular Jews, immigrants from Europe,
Published without remuneration by New England Magazine in 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is an account of a woman who, confined to bed with an unnamed illness, slowly loses her grip on reality. Though the author enjoyed some renown during her lifetime, she was
When looking back at the modernist design revolution of the mid-twentieth century, Alvin Lustig doesn't immediately jump to mind, despite the fact that his influence is all around us. Lustig's career was cut short by diabetes developed as a teenager while he was growing up in Los Angeles. A year
"I should consider a passport as necessary a means of protection in Europe as a pistol would be in one of the rough Western settlements." This pearl of wisdom, worthy of Tocqueville, was offered by Mr. J. H. Rosenbaum, notary public, to a New York Times reporter in 1882. Rosenbaum, whose office was
There is no more powerful force in George Eliot's fiction than marriage. It wrecks her characters' health, forces them to give up their professional ambitions, and reveals them for who they really are. A "liberal allowance of conclusions," Eliot writes at the beginning of Middlemarch, "has facilitated
Few things revel so freely in the pageantry and nostalgia of southern identity as the scene surrounding Churchill Downs on Derby Day. In fact, bluegrass horse country in general—with its white fences, white suits, and white spectators—is the very vision of a moneyed southern idyll: juleps,
At age twenty-seven, in 1957, Ronald Fraser moved to a tiny Spanish pueblo twenty miles west of Malaga to write a novel he called A Hollow Man—a self-deprecation meant to echo Bellow's Dangling Man, which he admired. The novel never came to fruition, but his residency in the town of Mijas would later
Geoffrey O'Brien is the sort of author who arouses a wholesome envy in the hearts of other writers. During more than three decades at the keyboard, he has published seven volumes of poetry and eight of essays, memoir, fiction, and cultural history, and he is the editor in chief of the Library of
