Asphalt always gets to me, but the malaise is never worse than after the leaves fall, before the first snow, when the trees are bare and the sky is dark and all I see when I look up and down Ocean Parkway from my terrace is gray, gray, and more gray. Even as I narrow in on the end of . . .
The University of Chicago Press is reissuing Levi Stahl’s favorite work of fiction, Anthony Powell’s classic 12-volume roman fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time, as ebooks. Volume 1 is free this month.
If you’re loading Instapaper with holiday reading, be sure to include E.B. White’s gorgeous “The Death of a Pig,” on grief over losing livestock, written before Charlotte’s Web. (Via, via; on White & the environment.)
Katherine Anne Porter — writer, liar, social-climber, and expert divorcee and re-marrier — would have loved the drama surrounding her archives. (Via.) See also.
This cartoon — found in Mark Twain Himself: a Pictorial Biography, thanks to Macy Halford — exposes my beloved Twain as a fellow noise-intolerant freak. Evidently he rose on Thanksgiving night at the cartoonist’s house “to stop the clocks that were interfering with his sleep.” I myself have gotten out of bed to silence clocks in other people’s houses. I . . .