A Poet's Notebook
The Inside Random House series has released another video. This one gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the publisher’s offices as book designers explain their creative processes and the experience of creating covers for some of the world’s best-known authors. What’s great about this video is that we get to see some of the best…
Coyote Canyon Press just published the first of two novels by Hermann Hesse, an endeavor we’re calling our Hermann Hesse Project. Just published is Gertrude. The text for this edition is taken from Adele Lewisohn’s translation of 1915, Gertrude and I, published in New York by The International Monthly. Gertrude was the first novel by Hermann…
H. L. Mencken with a Remington understrike typewriter H.L. Mencken as a uniquely American voice was The American Language, a book he believed would be “my swan song.” Through the humid months of 1918, a shirtless Mencken could often be found on the sleeping porch of his home in Baltimore amongst piles of reference works…
At the time of his trial and execution in 399 BC, Socrates had reached the age of seventy. He had lived through the Periclean Age when Athens was at the pinnacle of Imperial power, then through twenty-five years of war with Sparta and Athens’ defeat in 404. He did, however, live to see the restoration…
“Realism” is an element of some of Abrose Bierce’s short stories (particularly those concerning the Civil War), but the term is of little value when discussing his often fantastical imagination. In his essay “The Short Story” he writes: ‘Probability? Nothing so improbable as what is true. It is the unexpected that occurs . . ….
From among his few short stories, William Austin’s fame rests primarily with one, “Peter Rugg, or the Missing Man,” which became immensely popular and a favorite of Hawthorne and Longfellow. Austin incorporates legends of the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman into a New England setting, much as [[Washington Irving]] had done with Knickerbocker materials…
Three of the essays in this collection (“History,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-soul”) sprang from the 1836 lectures on the philosophy of history Emerson delivered at the Boston Masonic Temple. “History” really isn’t about history but how to convert the burden of the past into a survival kit for the future. “The fact narrated must correspond to…
The defining moment in the life of John Dos Passos came between August 16 and 20, 1917, when he experienced combat firsthand as an ambulance driver in France at the Battle of Verdun. Three days later he wrote to his friend Rumsey Marvin: The war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by lies and…
The first edition of Robert Frost’s third collection of poems, Mountain Interval, was published in 1916 by Henry Holt and Company and was dedicated “To you who least need reminding that before this interval of the South Branch under black mountains, there was another interval, the Upper at Plymouth, where we walked in spring beyond…