Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit links to and comments on a piece by James Pinkerton over at TechCentral about the immense popularity of...

The cover of Archipelago Books' selection of writings by Peter Altenberg. 

Peter Altenberg looking characteristically casual. 

Peter Altenberg (1859-1919) was the pen name of Richard Englaender. He was the quintessential Viennese bohemian, pioneering a leisurely sty...

One of the problems facing anyone who wants to blog is how to find the time. Obviously, successful bloggers have found solutions to that pro...

Walter de la Mare, one of my favorite poets, was born on April 25, 1873. Here's a link to his best-known poem, The Listeners . And here...

On Friday I got an email informing me that Blogit , which describes itself as "the first blog-for-pay community," and which featur...

J.P. Donleavy , author of The Ginger Man ,The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B. , and other books celebrates his 79th birthday today. You c...

Lionel Shriver, who has reviewed frequently for The Inquirer, is among three Americans -- out of six finalists -- nominated for the 2005 Ora...

Even older was this black oak, which is now 300 years old. 

This cucumber tree was already more than 50 years old when Charles Brockden Brown wrote his novel "Wieland," set in the Wissahicko...

My wife and I spent the afternoon in the Wissahickon, the setting for Charles Brockden Brown's 1799 novel Wieland . Brown's novel wa...

Ann Althouse throws down the gauntlet on the subject of mustaches.

"A real book-lover looks with infinite indulgence upon the simplest person's choice of books. He has the wit to know that this floo...

Portrait of the first tulip of the season. 

I took a week off, I told myself, so I could hunker down and do some blogging on a regular basis. As it happened, I spent most of my time ge...

Last night, my wife and I went to the Walnut Street Theatre to see The Constant Wife by Somerset Maugham . I’m a Maughan fan. I know that...

Tono Rondone, in comments to my original post about Arthur Miller and the American Dream (see below), takes a dim view of America. I've ...

Poet Robert Creeley died Wednesday, age 78. Here's an obituary from the Times of London and a link to a Robert Creeley Web site, which...

I am half way through Ian McEwan's Saturday , which I am going to review on Sunday. The novel has been widely, even extravagantly, prais...

A couple of blogs devoted usually to politics touch upon literature today: Power Line quotes Shakespeare and George Herbert (as quoted in a...

When playwright Arthur Miller died last month, much was made in the obituaries about what his plays had to say about the so-called American ...

Inquirer Features copy editor Paula Goff, who handled Sunday copy a couple of weeks ago, sent me an email about March 20's book page: ...

I had the pleasure last week of meeting Kevin O’Hara , the author of Last of the Donkey Pilgrims , the book I reviewed on March 13. He is ev...

John Perreault has some fascinating poems at Milk Magazine . In the note to the selection from Motets , he points out that the poems ...

Novelist Alice Thomas Ellis, author of The Sin Eater and the Summerhouse Trilogy — The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987), The Skeleton in the...

I have been alerted to two reviews of one of Steven Sills’s books – An American Papyrus -- at Project Gutenberg. The first is from the Arka...

I visited one of the sites listed by Jill Walker, The Daughters of Freya ( http://emailmystery.com/dof/index.php ). This is an email myster...

Jill Walker sends me an annotated list of email narratives that I've found online and it is very interesting. As I told Jill in an emai...

On Jan. 26 I wondered here concerning the whereabouts of an epistolary novel in the form of e-mail. Blogger Derik Badman assures me there is...

Steven Sills has published three books with Project Gutenberg ( http://www.gutenberg.org/ ) . I didn't know until Steven sent me an e-ma...

“The unexamined life,” Socrates declared, “is not worth living.” How would he have known? It’s hard to imagine Socrates ever leading an une...

I just received a call about a lecture tonight at the International Institute for Culture. The Rev. John Bartunek will talk about his book I...

Last night I had the pleasure of introducing William Hague, the former leader of Britain's Conservative Party and the author of William ...

Ann Althouse recently linked to a question that ought to arouse the interest of all readers of fiction: "In a search for meaningful rel...

Ian Keenan also waxed poetic regarding our Birds. His live reading of the piece at the Kelly Writer's House was broadcast on WXPN. Su...

Autumn Konopka ( www.winterspringsummer.com ) has sent me a poem -- which she read at Barnes & Noble in Bryn Mawr over the weekend -- fo...

Reader Willis Wayde asks if Robert W. Service would be considered a cowboy poet. I think so. He was certainly mentioned enough by people I t...

One of the nice things about having a blog, at least if you have a job like mine, is that you can supplement what you write in the paper wit...

The Times of London reports that a 13-year-old's novel about a girl sucked into a high-stakes virtual reality game is turning into a pub...

I'm in Elko, Nev., at the 21st National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. I would have been blogging sooner, but the laptop I brought has been, s...

A colleague and I were talking yesterday about how Internet reading differs from traditional reading. Obviously, it's less linear, which...

The Big Trunk at Powerline makes a point about poetry well worth pondering: http://powerlineblog.com/archives/009279.php

The weather outside doesn't strike me as at all frightful, but I didn't drive in it. But I was out walking in it and I shovelled my ...

One final thought regarding Hugh Hewitt's Blog . In it Hewitt proposes that someone start a blog for the publishing industry. That someo...

In my "Editor's Choice" column Sunday I reviewed Hugh Hewitt's excellent little book Blog . Hugh makes such a good case fo...