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One Million Strong
The Million Man March, twenty years later. Roderick Terry, Silhouettes, 1995. October 16 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Million Man March. The photographer Roderick Terry, then age thirty, was...
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Writ in Water
The enduring mystery of Keats’s last words. Photo: Giovanni Dall’Orto Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment For skies Italian … —John Keats, “Happy is England! I Could Be Content,” 1817 Among the...
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The Native Henry James
February 28 marks the hundredth anniversary of James’s death. Photo: Alice Boughton, 1916. Henry James died in London, at the age of seventy-two, on February 28, 1916, in the midst of World War I. His...
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Character Limit
From an Olivetti ad by Studio 44 Advertising, 1956. There’s an expression called “using too many points.” It refers to those moments when a novelist (or any storyteller, really) strains credulity by...
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A Maker of Mirrors
Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me turns fifty. Mimi and Richard Fariña, at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965. Photo: David Gahr I am gazing, as I write, at a...
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The Musician’s Day
A drawing by Satie in a letter to Jean Cocteau, 1917. “Monsieur Sadi in his house—he’s thinking.” Erik Satie, the composer and pianist, was born on this day 150 years ago. “There are many kinds of...
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The Unique Sound of the Cricket
Édouard Manet, Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, 1876. Stéphane Mallarmé died 118 years ago today. He wrote the letter below to his friend Eugène Lefébure, in May 1867, at age twenty-five, when he was...
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One Devil Too Many
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus at four hundred. The Devil and Dr. Faustus Meet, ca. 1825. Via Wellcome Images. Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus...
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On Uwe Johnson: The Hardest Book I’ve Ever Translated
This week marks the publication in English of Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl. This is the second of three essays by the translator, Damion Searls, a Paris...
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The Animal of a Life
Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 4.0. Saturday was Richard’s birthday, and we drove to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, where we met seventeen years ago. We...
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