One of Latin America's greatest novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa is also a most acute and wide-ranging cultural critic and an acerbic political commentator. Touchstones includes his readings of major twentieth-century novels, from Heart of Darkness...
In spring of 1846, Edgar Allan Poe moved from New York City to his country cottage in Fordham where he wrote "The Philosophy of Composition", an essay that promises to recount the method he used to write his famous poem "The Raven" (1845). In the...