The professional side of my reading ledger is always both pleasingly full and pleasingly regular, although no matter how many times I used it, that “professional” always feels a little odd as a description. After all, the new releases I read every month might be my profession, but they’re also my passion, which makes them feel entirely personal instead of professional.
National Library Week has been pretty rough, these last two years. It’s typically in April, and in early April of 2020, the country was first starting to realize that this weird new public health emergency, this new virus called COVID-19, was not going to magically go away – that it very well might, in fact, get much, much worse.
Recently there was a ruckus over on Twitter. You may not have heard about it, since Vermonters tend to have, you know, actual stuff to do. And ordinarily I wouldn’t bother you with it, but in this particular case I think it raises some interesting issues.
The Library of America, the black-jacketed best answer that American letters gives to the famous Pléiade editions of canonical French masterpieces, published its first volumes in 1982: a volume of Herman Melville containing his three adventure novels Omoo, Typee, and Mardi, the Tales and Sketches of Nathanial Hawthorne, a collection of the poetry and prose […]
A battered old journalist from the dear, long-gone Boston Evening Transcript was fond of grousing about deadlines and hack-work, as were many of his equally-hardened colleagues in the newsroom. He watched the endless parade of periodical columns with a permanent pained grimace, and at least a few times a week, he could be found at […]