Literature

The poem 'Love Recognized' by Robert Penn Warren seems to portray the onrush of love less as a time of connection or magical transformation than as some kind of isolating and cataclysmic event. The guiding metaphor is one of snow that far from cosseting the landscape or allowing us to hunker down cosily against a backdrop of brilliant white...

Denis Johnson's sturdy yet beguiling Train Dreams, from a slender book of little more than one hundred pages, tells the story of one man and his life in the Idaho panhandle during the first half of the twentieth century. Late in the novella its central character Robert Grainier is somewhat taken aback to be described as a hermit, chafing...

★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Ned Merrill is a lover of youth, a cad about town, a dreamer and in some ways an idealist plus one hell of a swimmer. He will be called a 'suburban stud' and a 'Peter Pan' by a woman who wonders aloud whether he will ever grow up, but for the meantime he is enjoying the Connecticut summer and has dropped in on a couple of friends, or more precisely in on their pool...