My Youthful Indiscretions, By Isaac Albéniz
Bruce Kellner

My Youthful Indiscretions, By Isaac Albéniz

I emerged from my mother’s exhausted womb after a dilatory gestation of eleven months and fifteen days to begin my stroll toward Iberia, with an heir presumptive’s wave, a whistler’s insouciant greeting in the key of Db where I was destined to linger in later years, and a bow to...
Joseph Cornell's Stereopticon
David Saunders

Joseph Cornell’s Stereopticon

Think of the great American surrealist Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) and consider the following description of a mysterious object­­ – a wooden structure with glass in front, through which one looks upon a dream world of celestial bodies, La Belle Époque, the Romantic Ballet, the Grand Hotels of Europe and all...
Chapters From Childhood: Reminiscences of an Artist’s Granddaughter
Juliet M. Soskice

Chapters From Childhood: Reminiscences of an Artist’s Granddaughter

Sometimes he smiled a different sort of smile—his whole face looked as if it were laughing and his eyes as well. But that was very rarely. Once, when he was having breakfast with a good many people one of his letters said that two very important people were coming to...
A Dalí Quartet
FORD | HANNAH | HOWARD | GELDZAHLER

A Dalí Quartet

So many facets to Dalí. I’m always writing haiku about Dalí. Different thoughts come to me about Dalí, and one thought came to me, that Dalí used to be very pretty, very good-looking. Garcia Lorca fell in love with him. When pretty-boy Dalí outgrew his pretty-boy looks he became “clown...
A Conversation between Ivy Compton-Burnett and Margaret Jourdain
Ivy Compton-Burnett and Margaret Jourdain

A Conversation between Ivy Compton-Burnett and Margaret Jourdain

M. J. We are both what our country landladies call “great readers,” and have often talked over other people’s books during this long quarter of a century between two wars, but never your books.
I. C. B. It seems an omission, as I am sure we have...
The Landor Variations
E.M. Forster and Walter Savage Landor

The Landor Variations

I strove with none; for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
Salvador Dalí: A Capsule Biography with Drawings
Elisabeth Kley

Salvador Dalí: A Capsule Biography with Drawings

In 1978, Christopher Makos photographed Andy Warhol kissing Salvador Dalí. For Warhol, it must have been a heartfelt moment of homage, since he was the only artist who ever approached Dalí’s mastery of publicity.

Clerihews
Jonathan WIlliams

Clerihews

The clerihew was invented in 1890 by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who was a schoolboy of 16 at St. Paul’s in London when the divine numen of Orpheus struck him. His best one seems to me:

My Name Is Luchko
Anna Saar and Elizabeth Frank

My Name Is Luchko

With the end in 1989 of the forty-five year Communist regime in Bulgaria, the lives of ordinary Bulgarians were up-ended by the change of the economic system, and many found themselves impoverished for the first time in their lives.

Seven Clues
Marek Waldorf

Seven Clues

“Most heads are routine,” he says. “Set the attachment at one of eight lengths, then slide the clipper up the back stretch, cruising from base to crown. The trick to it is there’s no trick to it.

J.M.W. Turner, R.A.
William Russell

J.M.W. Turner, R.A.

It is in no spirit of detraction that I string together a number of descriptive anecdotes of this great painter’s eccentricity of character and manner. They afford another illustration of the world-old truth, that the life of the highest and the best of us is woven of a mingled yarn of good and evil.

Recreational Writing: Leaves from My Notebook
Maggie Paley

Recreational Writing: Leaves from My Notebook

I was wrestling with despair, and I couldn’t imagine why anyone needed to download a movie to a cell phone in no time. Who watches a movie on a cell phone—and when?

An incident from the narrative EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS which while taking place in Bulgaria pivots about a violent death of a woman in Upstate New York.
Thomas McGonigle

An incident from the narrative EMPTY AMERICAN LETTERS which while taking place in Bulgaria pivots about a violent death of a woman in Upstate New York.

On the first aerial toll-house, the soul is questioned about the sins of the tongue

Four Excerpts from "Safe House, Durable Goods" – an Unpublished Memoir
Hope Cooke

Four Excerpts from “Safe House, Durable Goods” – an Unpublished Memoir

The first year I moved to Brooklyn, before I’d begun to obsess about money, I’d lain convalescent all winter on my new sofa (my first sofa) reading, filling spiral notebooks, scouring the texts like a medieval scribe to burn them into my brain.