Three excited girls bounded into my room at about twenty minutes to eight to deliver the announcement: Derek Walcott had died.

“Ash had fallen. Perhaps it had fallen the night before or perhaps it was still falling. I can only remember in patches.”In 1976, three years before she died, Jean Rhys published “Heat,” an autobiographical story about the 1902 eruption of Ma…

I had been out of college for a couple years when a friend got me a gig studying the “socially displaced.” This wasn’t as lofty as it sounds; what I really did was spend a couple months going around asking bums about their problems. The arrange…

I had to bury a dog in my backyard yesterday. She was a light brown mongrel and came up to about my knee—not huge, but not tiny, either. She showed up in the neighborhood a few months ago and gave birth to a couple of puppies under a neighbor’s w…

How sports taught me to think.Noam Chomsky once said that he was amazed at the insight and sophistication that the average American brought to the discussion of sports. Chomsky considered this use of brainpower to be a diversion that operated in the …

Growing up in the context of no context.A few years ago, my late friend D. G. Myers and I had a disagreement about the relationship between advertising and literary culture. Myers argued that the ads and articles in the Saturday Evening Post had a be…

Some of the writers and books I hold in the highest esteem were discovered en passant: buried in the archives of a little-read blog; mentioned in a thirty-year-old essay devoted to more prominent writers; planted near the end of a long list on Wikipe…

Building a library in Saint Lucia. This summer we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Today, meet Matthew St. Ville Hunte.  The first book I consciously acquired for what became my library was V.S. Naipaul’s The Writer and the World.…