Winter 2024

Joan Didion’s Where I Was From and Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts

In critical reviews and essays about my father, Irving Howe, one frequently encounters a certain neat formulation that declares he was a man who wrote about what he lived and knew.* He grew up with Yiddish as his first language, …

The graffito made famous by American GIs as a marker of place, of having been somewhere, stands rewritten as the name for a travel agency on Zellescher Weg in Dresden: “Kilroy Travels.” This phrase, printed in English over a stylized …

The simplest way to locate the Midwest is to accept that its borders aren’t fixed on the map. Unlike New England, which is a culture of six identifiable states, or the South, which at the very least includes the states …

The traveler’s great temptation is to fix a place with a phrase and then be done with it. Sometimes, despite all the possibilities for error, a phrase does work: Florence lives in its stones, as Mary McCarthy saw; Paris remains …

My father moved in a world of stories. He told his own in World of Our Fathers and A Margin of Hope; he wrote about those of Faulkner and Hardy, Anderson and Wharton, Dreiser and Sholom Aleichem, Leskov and George …