This is the season of the balance sheet. I don’t mean the kind where you tabulate all your shining moments and painful shortcomings—we still have a few days left before you need to get that maudlin—but rather the post-holiday period when you finally get a good sense of how many people gave you gifts for [...]

A Song On the End of the World Czeslaw Milosz (translated by Anthony Milosz) On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net. Happy porpoises jump in the sea, By the rainspout young sparrows are playing And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be. On [...]

All right, here comes the extra-long holiday weekend! Full of festive fun, family, and friends… or a host of other F-words: fatigued, forlorn, fractious. Maybe it’s just a blessed break from work or school. Or maybe you are working, either because you’re indispensable or just happy to take the overtime when things are quiet. Maybe [...]

If you work in publishing, or are looking for a job in publishing, you may have seen the help wanted ad posted by Dalkey Archive Press last week. The University of Illinois-based press is looking to expand its London office and move on from founder John O’Brien’s stewardship, with two or three people at the [...]

Not particularly literary, I guess, but for anyone as in need of a little inner peace as I’ve been this weekend, I offer you artist Tim Knowles’ Tree Drawings: A series of drawings produced using drawing implements attached to the tips of tree branches, the wind’s effects on the tree, recorded on paper. Like signatures [...]

With all due apologies for the end-of-semester posting paucity—one more week and we should be back on a somewhat more regular schedule—I have a new piece up at Bloom. Being the site’s Senior Writer holds all sorts of fine perks: a corner office, expense-account lunches, glamour, prestige… well, OK. Maybe not. But I can bring [...]