The Spirit of Salem: The Hawthorne Hotel
by Wes Newbury “The place isn’t haunted,” insists Juli Lederhaus, general manager of Salem’s Hawthorne Hotel. “There’s no documentation. People tell us they feel things, whatever,…
Tag: American Authors
Coffee and Bob Kaufman, Poet of the People
By Kerry Lee When I step through the door and catch that first, redolent wisp, that rich, provocative bouquet that doesn’t taste like it smells,…
Weaving Tales: The Tools of Text
By Janice Horton On a back road in an out of the way township in northeast Pennsylvania, a seasonal museum celebrates the crafts of spinning…
Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck on the Californian Coast
By Kat Clay The moment I saw him I knew he was the man I would marry. A twenty-minute conversation changed my life; in those…
“The pears fatten like little buddhas”: Inscribing Sylvia Plath onto Central Java
By Audrey McGlinchy I opened my notebook on a return flight from Jakarta, Indonesia to Chiang Mai, Thailand, my home for the past nine months.…
James Fenimore Cooper: Cooperstown’s Literary Ghost
by Victor A. Walsh By mid-morning on this dreary gray Sunday, crowds of people dressed in shorts and sporting baseball caps, are bustling in and…
Literary Brooklyn Heights
by Norm Goldstein “I live in Brooklyn,” Truman Capote once wrote. “By choice.” He described the New York City borough, for the most part, as…
Southern Gothic With A Magical Twist: Swamplandia!
By Katy Kelleher Set in the sparsely inhabited swamps of the Florida Everglades, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! is gorgeous entry into the American cannon. It is…
Richard Scarry’s Best Luck Ever
By Melissa Mapes The bleary-eyed rabbit wrapped her paws around a coffee mug for warmth. Although we were indoors, the chill of a Bostonian spring…
One’s Self and the Other: NYC and The History of Love
I was standing alone in the Buhre Avenue station, waiting for the number six train to arrive and bring me downtown, where I would attend a going-away …