Some years ago, The New Yorker ran a cartoon of an equestrian statue in the center of a public square. A large, austere-looking soldier was perched high on his mighty steed, the American flag fluttering behind him. Think Napoleon, poised on a white stallion overlooking the battlefield at Austerlitz. The caption read something like: Valedictorian, […]
“Dear Mom and Dad, I am still having a GREAt time.” Like a refrain that echoes throughout a song or poem, these words begin almost all of the letters I wrote to my parents in 1961 and 1962 from Camp Walt Whitman in Pike, New Hampshire. The missives were stashed away in a box I […]
Dryad Press publisher (and co-founder of The Writer’s Center) Merrill Leffler talks with Ken Langer, author of A Nest for Lalita.
When I lived in Varanasi as a college student, I took tabla lessons from the late Kedar Nath Bhowmick, a professor of mathematics at Benares Hindu University. Here he is, on the left, in 1970. The other photo is me last February when I visited his home 50 years later, only to find out […]
Okay, Raymond Carver, you may be a great writer, but you really blew it with your short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. I like the first part where two couples are arguing about the nature of love. Especially when Terri talks about her ex-hubby Carl, who used to drag her […]