Not long after I fell in love with my wife, I fell in love with her father. I can’t say for sure if I loved him until after she and I were married, but I liked him from that very first night.
It seemed that every moment winter would touch its own back. The year’s last snow melted in the daytime, budded again overnight from sidewalks and car hoods, consuming into March and then into April days the deep patience of the most...
So much of what forms us is accidental, ephemeral-seeming. When I was young I knew I wanted to be an artist. Sometimes I wanted to be a writer, too, and make books; sometimes I wanted to be a singer.
A nagging question in Frost criticism in the half-century since the author’s death has been where to place him in the larger narrative of American poetry.
For some of us concerned about the fate of sheet music, Song Reader also served as a litmus test of sorts: How many music fans (at least among the sample Beck attracts) still read, or know someone who reads, Western music notation, notes...
Truth is the goal of the memoir—or at least of its preface. Such authenticating devices are ways of gaining trust in a distrustful world. And yet such a disclaimer comes up against the problem encountered by a fabricator coming clean: “To...
A century after his birth, Camus is still mislabeled and misunderstood in too many quarters. He was not a brooding, self-absorbed existential poseur, but a man of political and ethical commitment whose primary value was solidarity, the...
