Now I am thinking about jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, and about other places where people have jumped to their deaths for many years. I think I should find out more about this, for I have an idea that there is some son of collection of spirit strength or power or love in them that says no, or yes, or now.

Janet Flanner, under the pen name of Genêt, began writing her fortnightly "Letter” for The New Yorker in October, 1925, a few months after the magazine was founded.

Gustave flaubert’s niece, Caroline Franklin Grout, once made note of a habit he had “of writing out his most profound impressions for himself alone, at the moment of experiencing them, then placing them in sealed envelopes.” He did this, she recalled, at the deaths of his friends Alfred Le Poittevin and Louis Bouilhet, and perhaps also at the death of his sister. 

I was almost fifteen. I was working at my first real job at a place called the Spudnut Shop, a doughnut store, in Union Gap, Washington, June of 1955. This very good looking young man walked in with

In early December 1946, I arrived in Warsaw at midnight after an arduous train journey from Prague. In their retreat, the Germans had nearly destroyed Poland's railroad system, and our train with its few passengers took four times as long to reach Warsaw as it had before the war.

A year and a few months after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn. Everywhere I went, I sensed the tracks of the wolf that had tried to devour the city. But Paris proved as inedible as it had been since its tribal beginning on an island in the Seine, He de la Cite.

Jack and Dwayne lived in apartment 6E in a twelve-story building facing Central Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. One morning in the late fifties, I moved into the apartment above theirs with my two young sons, our clothes, a few pieces of furniture, some boxes of books and games and papers, including my divorce decree, and a carton or two of kitchen odds and ends.

It’s quite possible that the existence of these eight short stories, taken word for word from a collection of 148 diaries found in a dumpster in 2001, would come as a surprise to the diarist, Laura Francis.

In bohemian postwar Manhattan, poets (Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch) naturally gravitated to painters (Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers) whose work they appreciated on its own terms. Certain poets were lauded for their perceptive, unbiased eye; some painters instinctively sensed a resonant poem. Painter Helen Frankenthaler and poet James Schuyler had such a mutual appreciation. Their run-in during the 1954 Venice Biennale was memorable enough to open Schuyler’s poem “Torcello” (they must have met previously to have recognized each other, though it is unclear when). In any case, they kept circling: Schuyler reviewed Frankenthaler’s shows at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1957 and at the André Emmerich Gallery in 1960.

The portraits that follow are from a large number of photographs recently recovered from sealed archives in Moscow, some—rumor has it—from a cache in the bottom of an elevator shaft. Five of those that follow, Akhmatova, Chekhov (with dog), Nabokov, Pasternak (with book), and Tolstoy (on horseback) are from a volume entitled The Russian Century, published early last year by Random House. Seven photographs from that research, which were not incorporated in The Russian Century, are published here for the first time: Bulgakov, Bunin , Eisenstein (in a group with Pasternak and Mayakovski), Gorki, Mayakovski, Nabokov (with mother and sister), Tolstoy (with Chekhov), and Yesenin. The photographs of Andreyev, Babel, and Kharms were supplied by the writers who did the texts on them. The photograph of Dostoyevsky is from the Bettmann archives. Writers who were thought to have an especial affinity with particular Russian authors were asked to provide the accompanying texts. We are immensely in their debt for their cooperation.