I was thinking about this passage when I awoke very cold this morning. Here’s one of our favorite narrators ever, Ishmael, in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, explaining why you have to be just a little bit cold to appreciate the snug warmth of a bed on a...

Roberto Bolaño, from an interview with Eliseo Álvarez, republished this month in Melville House’s Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview: I suppose that within his brutality and his courage–he is a very courageous man–my father loved me as I love my...

Hamilton Leithauser, vocalist/lyricist for one of our favorite bands, The Walkmen, shared what he enjoyed reading this past year at The Millions, part of their year-end “A Year in Reading 2009” series (we dig plenty of the literati who contribute to...

When Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart came out a few months ago, most critics obsessed over the ironic possibilities of a Bob Dylan Christmas album, especially one called Christmas in the Heart, especially one with that cover. Had these critics...

Roberto Bolaño’s slim novel Distant Star begins a few months prior to Pinochet’s bloody 1973 coup and continues into the mid-nineties, crossing through several countries in the process. The unnamed narrator (presumably the “Arturo B.” mentioned in a...