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In Defense of Wanderlust
Elisabeth Eaves.When you’re young—a child, a teenager, a twenty-something—it seems, as Elisabeth Eaves says, “like it will never end. You can do anything because time is limitless, it’s infinite.” You...
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A Question of Provenance; Monogamy
Dear Lorin, May I once more avail myself of the generous hospitality of your advice column to help solve another of my small mysteries? I am currently editing the 1852–54 journal kept on the Australian...
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A Bookish Wedding
“The library has always been a sanctuary for me. I always felt validated as a child when the librarian went to, what I believed at the time, great lengths to attend to my inquisitiveness,” says Barbara...
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A Chain on the Great Feelings
The deceptively breezy poems of Stevie Smith. Photo: Jane Bown Stevie Smith’s playful, carnivalesque poems, tiny on the page but emotionally trenchant, are getting a new life—her Best Poems were...
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Darling, Come Back, and Other News
Photo: Jnlin, via Wikimedia Commons In Taiwan, a commemorative Valentine’s Day train ticket sold out in less than an hour: it takes you from “Dalin (大林, pronounced similarly to ‘darling’ in English)...
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Growing Up Together
Love through the lens of Fellini. Fellini and Masina on the set of La Strada, 1954. Photo: Studio Patellani Among the central occupations of Fellini’s work is what he wants from the women in his life....
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Chevrolet Caprice
A 1987 Chevrolet Caprice. On a Tuesday in late August, on my way to the ferry landing at Thirty-Fourth Street, I saw a huge, white, rusted-out Chevy Caprice make an illegal turn off FDR Drive, nearly...
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Snub Your Suitors the Brontë Way, and Other News
She knew how to say no. Charlottë Bronte, painted by Evert A. Duyckinck, based on a drawing by George Richmond, 1873. Need to reject a marriage proposal or two? Take a page from Charlotte Brontë’s...
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The Physiology of Marriage
This man could save your marriage—or ruin it. A portrait of Balzac, based on an 1842 daguerreotype It’s Honoré de Balzac’s birthday, making this as good an occasion as any to investigate one of his...
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Passional Affinities
The free-love couple who pissed off nineteenth-century America. A lithograph against polygamy from an 1850 book. In the summer of 1853, the Tribune of New York published a pointed letter directed at...
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Marriage Plot
From Twenty Years a Detective in the Wickedest City in the World, a 1908 book—putatively nonfiction—by Clifton R. Wooldridge, “the Incorruptible Sherlock Holmes of America.” In his agony [Devel]...
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John Bayley on British Wit
John Bayley with Iris Murdoch, 1980. The New York Times has reported that John Bayley died last week at eighty-nine. A literary critic and Oxford don, Bayley was best known for his vivid, searching...
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Ordinary Human Love: An Interview with Clancy Martin
Clancy Martin. Photo © Greg Martin I first encountered Clancy Martin’s writing in NOON sometime in 2006 or 2007. He became one of my favorite writers. I looked forward to new work from him, wanting to...
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The Stinking Fog of Falsehood
A letter from Saul Bellow to Jack Ludwig, circa February 1961. Ludwig and Bellow had met years earlier at Bard College, where they became close friends. Later, Ludwig began an affair with Bellow’s...
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Plus Ça Change
A portrait of Charlotte Brontë from The Brontë Sisters, by Patrick Branwell Brontë, ca. 1834. From Charlotte Brontë’s letter to her friend Ellen Nussey, April 2, 1845. Brontë and Nussey exchanged...
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Steins
Here are the things you hear most often when you announce plans to marry someone who happens to have the same last name:That’s convenient!Guess you won’t have to change your name!Are you changing your...
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Husbands and Wives
One soon learns the point of a modern honeymoon. In this day and age, when most couples don’t need the time to become acquainted, it can seem like pure indulgence: a well-earned rest after the...
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Time Wasted
From The Little Prince.When we got married, my husband and I knew we didn’t want to do anything elaborate: we had neither the money nor the inclination and, in any case, we wanted to get the wedding...
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The Eternal Ham
Anne Vallayer-Coster, Still Life with a Ham, 1767.Dorothy Parker is said to have been the author of one of the best quotes in history: “Eternity is a ham and two people.” Like many such quips, it’s...
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The Lights in the Kitchen Were On
At the table with James Salter. Salter in 1989. Photo: Sally Gall “To revisit the past was like constantly crossing some Bergschrund,” James Salter writes in the introduction to his 1997 memoir, “a...
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