Correspondence Archives

Family Portrait

by John Berger,

From letters exchanged by John Berger and his son Yves, collected in Over to You, which will be published this month by Pantheon Books. Yves, I send two “postcards.” One…

Faxing Poetic

by Seamus Heaney,

From letters collected in The Letters of Seamus Heaney, which will be published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dear Loving Man, All this is spilling out like a…

High Praise

by John le Carré,

From a 1992 letter written by John le Carré (David John Moore Cornwell) to Philip Roth, sent after le Carré read a draft of Roth’s Operation Shylock. The letter is…

Cold as ICE

by Oscar Wilde,

From a letter written in 1897 to the editor of the British newspaper the Daily Chronicle. The letter is included in The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde, published in…

Kiss and Tell

by Marina Tsvetaeva,

From a letter written by Marina Tsvetaeva to Boris Pasternak in 1927. Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) was a poet. The letter was included in the February issue of the PN Review. Translated…

The Elements of Vile

by Mitchel lIvers,

From editorial notes given to Milo Yiannopoulos, a leader of the “alt-right,” by Mitchell Ivers, a vice president at Simon & Schuster, on his manuscript for Dangerous. Last year, Simon…

An Off Pursuit

by Joan Murray,

From a draft of a letter written in 1940 by Joan Murray (1917–42) to W. H. Auden (1907–73). The letter is included in Drafts, Fragments, and Poems, a collection of…

Moral Turpitude

by Stephanie LaCava,

The many transgressions of Carolee Schneemann

The Seven-Year Itch

by Patrick Leigh Fermor,

From a letter written by Patrick Leigh Fermor to Enrica Soma in 1961. Soma was a model and ballerina, and the wife of the director John Huston. Fermor was the…

The General

by Emma Reyes,

By Emma Reyes (1919?2003), a painter, from a letter written in 1969 to Germán Arciniegas, a historian and journalist. The Book of Emma Reyes, a memoir, will be published in…

Silver Linings Daybook

by Arsenii Formakov,

From letters sent by Arsenii Formakov to his family, in Riga. Formakov was a Latvian poet, novelist, and journalist. In 1940, he was arrested for anti-Soviet activities and sentenced to…

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