I’ve known Adrienne Rich, in her work, since 1952, when I was eighteen. I was walking down Garden Street, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one day in my first weeks at Radcliffe College, when a kindly old gentleman spoke to me, and as we talked...
At the beginning of the last century, a little boy named Nemo was haunted by recurring nightmares of a bizarre and unruly land where the conventions of everyday life were turned upside down. By day, the boy was firmly lodged in the...
Before I read Daniel Karlin’s excellent new book Proust’s English, I had never given a thought to the word “smart” as part of the French lexicon. Either its vogue in French is long passed, as Karlin suggests, or I do not travel in...