Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword
Just a few years after The Waste Land appeared — a poem whose difficulty critics compared to some “pompous cross-word puzzle” — Edward Powys Mathers (alias: Torquemada) pioneered the cryptic: a puzzle form that, like modernist poetry, unwove language and rewove it anew. Roddy Howland Jackson reveals the pleasures and imaginative creatures lurking in Torquemada's lively grids. more
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Works by the American Impressionist painter, printmaker, and embodiment of a “New Woman” of the 19th century.
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A second life? To live again? Fyodor Dostoevsky survived the uncanny pantomime of his own execution to be “reborn into a new form”. Here Alex Christofi gives these very words a kind of second life, stitching primary source excerpts into a “reconstructed memoir” — the memoir that Dostoevsky himself never wrote. more
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