What is a library? Is it a collection of books, a suite of digital resources, a space for studying? Where do our current ideas about libraries come from, and where […]
Welcome Home, John Barth
What do you call 30-odd boxes of books and 25 boxes of manuscripts, letters, newspaper reviews, notebooks, and assorted papers? Well, if those boxes contain essential primary sources for the […]
Intersession in Special Collections: Get Down and Dirty with Books
So, you like the smell of ink and old paper? You love strange tales? Maybe you’re into the exotic locales they can take you to? Or maybe you like to […]
Browsing, Serendipity, and Virtual Discovery
Recently I went down to B-level in search of four books—titles I had come across in my reading that I was sure were going to explain the mysteries of the […]
Consumption’s Long Shadow
What does Stephen Crane have in common with Catullus, Molière, John Keats, all six Brontë siblings, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Anton Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield? […]
Stephen Crane’s War
If you’ve read anything by Stephen Crane, there’s a pretty good chance it was The Red Badge of Courage. Crane’s Civil War story is renowned for its insider perspective on […]
Stephen Crane’s Career
How do you become a professional writer? It helps to have a family member provide a model—or better yet, both parents and a couple of siblings. It also helps to […]
Goodbye Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe, the renowned Nigerian novelist and essayist, died on March 22, at age 82. Achebe was best known for his ground-breaking novel of 1958, Things Fall Apart, which dramatizes […]
The Writing Life
If you’re a professional writer, you probably think a lot about how to get your work under the eyes of readers. You may weigh the advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing—using […]
Jacques Barzun, 1907 – 2012
Back before Frankenstorm Sandy took over the air-waves, academia met its demise. Well, not academia as it is today–we are all still here, obviously!–but academia as it existed in the […]