A Poet's Notebook
The Museum of London said Wednesday that an archaeological dig had uncovered part of the gravel yard and gallery walls of the 435-year-old Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. The site is situated behind a pub on a site marked for redevelopment just east of London’s business district. The remains are of a polygonal structure, typical of…
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[/caption]Amazon.com Inc. plans to open two new fulfillment centers in California over the next year, a move in response to an online sales tax deal between the online retailer and the state of California.
The Kindle Fire is burning up the tablet competition — on the Android side. Amazon.com Inc.’s tablet computer is catching fire on in a big way, having grabbed 54.4% of the Android tablet market during February, the fourth month it was on the market, according to new data from comScore Inc. That represented almost double…
She was the daughter of a Congregational preacher, the sister of five preachers, and the husband of another. She was raised in a family that devoted themselves to Christian purpose, “a kind of moral heaven, replete with moral oxygen — fully charged and with intellectual electricity.” Several members of her family were also famous in…
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[/caption]Novelist Harry Crews has died from complications from neuropathy. Crews, who died at his home in Gainesville, Florida, was 76. “He had been very ill,” his ex-wife, Sally Crews, tells the Associated Press in this report. “In a way it was kind of a blessing. He was in a lot of pain.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a rich and darkly morbid story that showcases Hawthorne’s art at its most sensuous and florid. It is the story of a beautiful young woman in a poisonous garden, and its gorgeous and lethal beauty are wonderfully done. The story is a sinister one in that the growing signs of…
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…