Marks in the Margin

On this day in 2008, Marks in the Margins posted its first blog. Now, ten years later and after almost 1,000 posts, Marks in the Margins i...

In the “late season” of my life, I have been rereading some of my favorite books. Reading a book for the second or third time can be quite ...

Each year I add to my Commonplace Book a section that I refer to as Briefs. Briefs are provocative comments, a word or phrase, a quotation ...

Richard has read Foucault and Baudrillard, and also Hegel and Nietzsche, but he doesn’t know what you can eat when you have no money to buy ...

“ To write! What a marvelous thing! ” Paul Léautaud Not long after James Salter died, his wife began rummaging through the boxes of articl...

Principles are the main ingredient of courage. A man with principles can get the better of fear. Scott Turow’s novel, Ordinary Heroes , ...

The mission of Literary Arts is to engage readers, support writers, and inspire the next generation with great literature. I arrived in Po...

I had long ago learned to prefer the imagined encounter, or the memory of the imagined encounter to the thing itself. Andre Aciman There...

House of Literature Imagine a place in the center of your city where you can go to hear writers speak about their work, discuss literature ...

As I have got older, I have instead come to realize that we have no idea whatsoever as to how physical matter gives rise to consciousness, t...

It was 5 years ago that I first read Jennie Erdal’s The Missing Shade of Blue. I had forgotten what a great book it is. A philosophical t...

They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea. Horace When I was younger, I used to yearn for a warmer place to live. B...

Community-Supported Models A C.S.A refers to a community-supported agricultural group that encourages its members to upfront funds to a far...

I am reading Memories of Chekhov edited by Peter Sekirin. It is not a biography, or an autobiography but rather the recollections of the ma...

Not everything you did had a reason . Peter Stamm After a summer vacation in Spain, Astrid and Thomas and their two young children return...

Every third thought shall be my grave . Shakespeare, The Tempest Robert McCrum is an English writer, associate editor of the Sunday Obser...

Autumn is upon us now and I have the good fortune and the time to reread some of my favorite books. A few are about writers who have been t...

Memory is a willful dog. It won’t be summoned or dismissed but it cannot survive without you. It can sustain you or feed on you. It visits w...

PARIS — A French farmer who smuggled migrants across the Italian border was sentenced on Tuesday to a suspended four-month prison term in a ...

It’s been 6 years since the Occupy Wall Street protests began on September 17, 2011 in New York’s Zuccotti Park. We are the 99%, they chant...

We knew we had just witnessed thousands of deaths; we clung to each other as if we ourselves were falling. John Updike It was a Tuesday, ...

We cast the shadows of our emotions on others and they theirs on us. Sometimes we threaten to choke on them. But without them there would ...

I’ve been watching the scenes from Houston. The television coverage is as relentless as the rain. The subject is catastrophic. What I see...

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun, And I say it's all right . George Harrison A week ago, on Monday, August 21st, the eclipse in...

In the July 31st issue of the New Yorker , Louis Menand asks “Can Poetry Change Your Life?” It’s a long and discursive discussion of pop cu...