One of nineteenth century Russia's most interesting and idiosyncratic writers, Nikolai Leskov, is newly available in an English language...

I'm always a little uneasy when I hear young soldiers talking about "good guys" and "bad guys." How, I wonder, do th...

I never know how to react when I learn that a contemporary has passed on. Dean Faulkner was William Faulkner's niece and stepdaughter....

Who would name a boat Yoknapatawpha? And why? A good brief essay on boat naming, history and literature explains .

I think that I shall never see, A billboard lovely as a tree.

Yesterday I asked in passing whether ferries have trolls. I now realize some readers may not recognize the reference. It has been about se...

My recent comments on eccentrics has drawn a response . Just to avoid misunderstanding, I am not opposed to eccentrics . The late Mr. Faulkn...

I popped into Town and Country not long ago to buy some essential item and was delighted to run into one of our long-time residents, Tony Th...

A great man died today. Vaclav [pronounced "Vatslav"] Havel had been a literary figure and dissident under the Czechoslovak comm...

“The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent gover...

One of the delights of reading other people's blogs is the occasional encounter with a telling, humorous phrase. This may even happen in...

Some say that modern Americans don't deal well with death and dying. We avoid the subject, they say, and do our best to deny that it wil...

V.P. Ferguson was, to say the least, an unconventional student. He arrived at the University of Mississippi from Columbus in the early 19...

Happy Bastille Day! Historian David McCullough puts our ties with France in perspective in today's New York Times . He gets one thing wr...

I am not an economist, though I once stayed at a Holiday Inn Express. Joking aside, I did study International Economics as a part of my stud...

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fa...