Here’s how I read Mallarmé’s prose, in Barbara Johnson’s lustrous new English translation: painfully, dutifully, passionately, a sentence at a time, while holding the French original in my other hand, so I can compare her sentence with his sentence, and so I can measure as accurately as possible each crevice where an adjective meets a noun, a comma meets a dependent clause.

Perhaps the most romanticized figure in the world is the male war correspondent. Scruffy, haunted, he walks the wreckage alone in battered—but good—European shoes. He smokes (if he’s not American). He has trouble with commitment. Yet his female counterpart cuts a different profile. At his age, she’ll seem leathery and lonely. It’s better that she doesn’t smoke.

Bart Giamatti’s first book, an adaptation of his dissertation titled The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (1966), examined the garden in literature as a symbol of respite and beauty. After his tumultuous and ultimately disappointing reign as president of Yale from 1978 to 1986, Giamatti must have felt that he’d found his own Eden when he ascended to baseball’s commissionership, with an opportunity to lead America’s most pastoral and literary sport. Instead, what he got was a faceful of Pete Rose.

In 1960, Christa Wolf received a phone call from the Russian newspaper Izvestia, inviting her to participate in an imaginative project devised by Maksim Gorky in 1935, which asked writers worldwide to describe their actions during the course of a random day—September 27—as exactly as possible. Wolf, then thirty-one and living in East Germany, not only documented the day but permanently adopted the project as a preventative measure against forgetting. “Transitoriness and futility as twin sisters of forgetfulness: again and again I was (and am) confronted with that eerie phenomenon,” she explains in the introduction to One Day a Year,

In 1999, after an impressive career as an investigative journalist, author, and critic, Nicols Fox took up bookselling on idyllic Mount Desert Island in Maine, home of Acadia National Park. I recently discussed the transfor­mations her little bookshop has undergone there, first operating out of her small Bass Harbor home, then from a picture-perfect shop front in affluent Southwest Harbor three miles away, and most recently as a “virtual bookshop” on the Web. As author of Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives (Island Press, 2002), Fox has described the historical importance of resisting

Chance May Crown Thee APRIL 1–7 Is there anything SHAKESPEARE didn’t say? Settle your bets with the new Modern Library edition of the complete works. It comes out just two days after Abrams Books releases Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet, an illustrated guide to muscled melancholy, and Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, a tale of star-crossed lovers […]