In December 1903, Thomas Mann wrote his older brother, Heinrich, a long letter reviewing the latter’s novel—with brutal candor. Some of the most scathing bits are below. The complete missive is in The ...

Agosto Machado’s apartment and studio on East Third Street is crammed, floor to ceiling, with steel bookcases bursting with ...

Remember where I came from. Think of a continent of sabled czars. Leave your home. Let exile fill your mouth like the lost language of the child. Understand the reason. A man who would not wear the ...

June, 1923: The French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin was traveling on mule back in the vastness beyond the Great Wall, west of Peking. He saw it from a distance: the Ordos, the inner Mongolian ...

I have been a stalwart advocate for the legacy of Charles White. I have said it so often, it could go without saying. I have always believed that his work should be seen wherever great pictures are ...

The office administrator would have thought I’d lost my mind if I’d turned in all those receipts. I hid them from her and ...

And wylde for to hold, though I seme tame. W.S. MERWIN: I think this is probably the greatest sonnet Wyatt wrote, and I think it's one of the greatest sonnets in English. I've known it for so many ...

The lines kept playing in my mind, like a song. I asked a few people, neighbors, street sellers, drivers, ‘What are you going ...

Montreal/Paris/London/New York/Berlin/Chicago/Seoul/Amsterdam/Mexico City/Tokyo/Vancouver/Los Angeles. In the Day-Glo light ...

An epilogue. 10:35 P.M. I spot Amelia and Anne in the crowd walking back to the ferry. Amelia thinks that Stepan Trofimovich must really have been supposed to look like Marx: when he was dying in ...

“They’re waiting for an autograph from Salman Rushdie,” the man behind me explained. After everything he’s been through. People were gathering behind a barricade at a door of the 92nd Street Y, down ...