Sublime

Hemingway had disliked Zelda since their first meeting in Paris, when he gazed into her “hawk’s eyes” and saw a rapacious spirit. He estimated that 90 percent of Scott’s problems were her fault,

In the 1980s, Milwaukee was the epicenter of deindustrialization. In the 1990s, it would become “the epicenter of the antiwelfare crusade.” As President Clinton was fine-tuning his plan to “end welfare as we know it,” a conservative reformer by the name of Jason Turner was transforming Milwaukee into a policy experiment that captivated lawmakers ar

He poured his heart out in a missive to his little brother, now a respected art dealer himself. He likened himself to a caged bird in spring who feels deeply that it is time for him to do something important but cannot recall what it is, and so “bangs his head against the bars of his cage. And then the cage stays there and the bird is mad with suff

The city fascinated Wolfe, and when he was not working, he enjoyed nothing more than walking through every part of town with his editor.

while lacking youth’s verve, Freddy had all of youth’s passions; one could sit back with a bag of popcorn and watch the romances and comedies of his mind projected onto his face, and the lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses swirled with his thoughts like the iridescent membranes of soap bubbles.

At age fifty he viewed himself, after publication of two books of nonfiction, one on the war, the other a personal account of the Irish troubles, plus the short story collection and innumerable articles for national magazines, as a conundrum, a man unable to define his commitment or understand the secret of his own navel, a literary gnome. He serio

Mr Hawley’s disgust at the notion of the Pioneer being edited by an emissary, and of Brooke becoming actively political – as if a tortoise of desultory pursuits should protrude its small head ambitiously and become rampant – was hardly equal to the annoyance felt by some members of Mr Brooke’s own family. The result had oozed forth gradually, like