Over the years, Einstein received a lot of letters from children. “I am a little girl of six,” one announced in large letters drawn haphazardly across the full width of the writing paper. “I saw your picture in the paper. I think you ought to have a haircut, so you can look better.” Having given her advice, the girl, with model formality, signed it, “Cordially yours, Ann.” “I have a problem I...
There has always been a gap between the English-language author Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Yiddish writer who published under at least three pseudonyms: Yitskhok Bashevis, Yitskhok Varshavski, and D. Segal. The publication of Singers wartime writings presents one of the first attempts to close that gap. Singers Writings on Yiddish and Yiddishkayt: The War Years, 1939-1945, the first of three...
A message had arrived at the telegram office that morning. As the mailman approached the seaside apartment in Mumbai, India, that my grandfather Brij Kishore shared with my grandmother Chandrakanta and their four children, he felt his throat tighten as she pulled on his sleeve and said, Taar aaya hai. In Bombay in the 1960s, the arrival of a taara telegramusually meant bad news. Few homes had...
Montral is a city of parallel universes, often most at ease ignoring each other. Across linguistic, cultural, and generational orbits, its also a city thats shown tremendous appetite for German author Jenny Erpenbecks work, in great part due to De Stiil, an anglophone bookstore in the heart of francophone neighborhood Le Plateau. Owner Aude Le Dubs carefully curated shop features literary fiction...
The beautiful word Shenandoah, of unknown Native American origin, stands for a river and an opulently green valley. Willa Cathers Virginia forebears on both sides had been there for four generations. Winchester township, seat of Frederick County, lies along the old turnpike between North and South and repeatedly changed hands in the course of the Civil War. Willas grandfather William Cather, of...
I first heard of Willa Cather as a teenage bookseller in North Denver, at a new, used, rare, and antiquarian bookshop that had once been a mechanics garage. At the bookstore, there was an entire section of Cathers famous works, which I had labeled meticulously with colored markers on scraps of printer paper. I dont remember hearing of Death Comes for the Archbishop. Instead, I sold heaps of used...
An imposing six foot by six foot steel box in mid-century medical gray with two projectors on either end and a pair of binoculars in the middle, the Hinman Collator looks more like something used by neurologists to diagnose brain tumors than a machine for analyzing Renaissance literary texts. The eponymous invention was fashioned by Charlton Hinman, a former Second-World-War-cryptologist-turned...
Shakespeare’s First Folio Table of Contents Shakespeare’s First Folio — The Tempest (page 2) Shakespeare’s First Folio — Romeo & Juliet __________________________________ Images © The British Library Board, excerpted with permission from Shakespeare’s First Folio: 400th Anniversary Facsimile Edition: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, Published According to...
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took her seat on the Supreme Court bench on August 10, 1993, she became the second female to serve on the country’s highest court, joining Justice Sandra Day O’Connor(nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981). In the court’s group portrait from RBG’s first term, the nine justices, posed in front of red velvet curtains, wear flowing black judicial robes. The...
Imagine our world without writing. No pencils, no pens, no paper, no grocery lists. No chalkboards, typewriters or printing-presses, no letters or books. No computers or word-processors, no e-mail or Internet, no social media; and without binary codestrings of ones and zeroes that create computer programsno viewable archives of film or television, either. Writing evolved to perform tasks that...