love letters

  • A Note about Love

    Elegance is a refinement of simplicity rather than a flourish of excess. Elegance prompts wit rather than comedy, sentiment rather than sentimentality. Such restraint is the lens through which all the diffuse sensations of desire are focused into the flame…

  • One Hundred Thousand Miles

    One Hundred Thousand Miles

    No one cares, of course, if you’re still capable at forty-four of being bad, or if you think you’ve got to be bad sometimes just to know you’re alive.

  • Love Letters and the Long Con

    This is a story is about a con that unfolded very slowly over two decades. When the con was finally exposed, some of the victims defended the people who had been fooling them. They preferred to believe the lie. NPR’s…

  • Lines Like Loss, Like Leaving

    Lines Like Loss, Like Leaving

    I know you understand me when I tell you this. I know you understand dead of night. Tell me what lines you’ve read so I know how to imagine you. Tell me who is gone. Tell me if you, like…

  • Little Jack’s Love Letters

    I shall worship her with quiet dignity. I shall draw her attention to me by exploits, success, and possibly a small measure of fame,” wrote a young, romantically inclined Jack Kerouac to a friend in one of a cache of…

  • Eulogy for the Love Letter

    Paper notes and postcards have all but joined rotary phones and singing telegrams in the history books of communication. Email and text messages might have the advantage of speed (and sometimes playful naughtiness), but neither can compensate for the tangible…

  • 10 Tales of Mischievous, Dangerous, and Illegal Love Letters

    10 Tales of Mischievous, Dangerous, and Illegal Love Letters

    Timothy Schaffert, author of THE SWAN GONDOLA, describes 10 old-timey epistolary romances that went awry.

  • Letters from James Dean

    A little bit of James Dean has been preserved in the recently-uncovered love letters he wrote to his girlfriend Barbara Glenn. They’re dated from 1954, the year before he was killed in an auto accident and also during the period…