The following piece appeared in Brick 76, and as the introduction to the 2005 edition of Charles Portis’s True Grit, published by in the U.K. by Bloomsbury Publishing and in the U.S. and Canada by Overlook Press.
It’s a . . .
When you’re writing a long book, it’s nice to have encouragement. I’m not talking about the giddy editor; or the eye-strained, proofreading spouse; or the steadfast mother. I’m talking about the gods. It’s good to have them on your side. . . .
In a characteristic mingling of modesty and fierce pride, Mavis Gallant has said that “one of the hardest things in the world is to describe what happened next.” It’s hard because of the value- and emotion-laden nature, not just of . . .
In 1898, Paula Modersohn-Becker, twenty-two and busy with her sketches, wrote that she was reading Marie Bashkirtsev’s diary. “Such an incredible observer of her own life. And me? I have squandered my first twenty years.”
I discovered Modersohn-Becker’s Letters and . . .
Our cat was raptured up to heaven. He’d never liked heights, so he tried to sink his claws into whatever invisible snake, giant hand, or eagle was causing him to rise in this manner, but he had no luck.
When . . .
Jane Jacobs is variously known as the guru of cities, an urban legend—“part analyst, part activist, part prophet.” In the more than forty years since the publication of her groundbreaking book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), . . .
Introduction to “The Sealion Hunter”
Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas was a Haida speaking mythteller, born around 1851 in the Haida village of Qaysun, “Sealion Town.” It is an empty beachfront now, but it was home, in the early nineteenth . . .
Whenever I happen to meet and talk with people who are complete strangers to me but who know me, insofar as one can, only through my writings, they almost always say that they’re surprised (and perhaps relieved) to find that . . .
A. J. Liebling’s account of Louisiana politics, The Earl of Louisiana, opens with the observation that “Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavour with every hundred yards away from the patch.” Most writers attempting to . . .