Brioche. Barouche. And one of them you can still buy, by the dozen, at the sweets stall in the weekend farmers market; the other hasn’t been seen in a century (although they tend to blend, to be conjoined twins, in my mind).
Everyone around the world with access to a television set saw the cataclysmic destruction of the World Trade Center towers, saw it in constant replay, burning—and burning itself into our collective retina. I saw it that way too, but first...
No preliminary explanation, no introduction to prepare us for this clearly fictional statement, couched in the third-person present tense familiar from The Master of Petersburg (his most recent novel at the time), and for those of us who...
Contemporary metrical verse surprises many learned readers simply by existing. For all the reasons that Paul Fussell summarizes and for a great number more, much of the liveliest recent scholarship concludes that literary and cultural...
Give us an incisor, and we’ll rationally conjecture an entire prehistoric head, to the glint in its eyes and in the light along its scaled skin —but first, we need that tooth, that seed
My alarm went off, and I lay in bed listening to the weather and news. It was September 11, 2001—an ordinary day, a workday, one of those early fall days that Minnesotans look back at longingly from winter’s chill. I went downstairs...
