But Goshen was not an attempt at charity. It was, according to my parents’ interpretation of scripture, a tangible ...

Emma has been called a detective novel, and with good reason: the fun of first reading it consists largely in scrutinizing ...

Taking in all the familiar faces speaking the tones of homeland, I exclaimed, ‘But it’s not possible!’  Mr. Chu smiled ...

But they are being constantly claimed and reclaimed, while for a long time it seemed that everybody wanted a piece of ...

The lines kept playing in my mind, like a song. I asked a few people, neighbors, street sellers, drivers, ‘What are you going ...

The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John ...

The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, ...

I tend not to think that stuff other people think is obvious is obvious. Everyone feels like they have some sense of Frost. Everyone knows a poem or two. That kind of overexposure lends an aspect of ...

Alfalfa smells warm and earthy and sort of sweet, like socks after a long hike, but not in a bad way. It is soft, with oblong green leaves the size of a pinkie nail. I know this because on a chilly ...

A young Henry James, writing about Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1879, notoriously remarked, “One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the ...

I am greeted by the same sight that greeted tens of thousands of young women before me, the same sight that greeted a younger self when my cab from JFK pulled up a decade ago, that greeted the ...

For her twenty-first birthday, in July 1952, Alice Munro’s husband gave her a typewriter. The present was as much a symbolic offering as a practical one. As Robert Thacker records in his biography, ...