I’ve taken up something new this summer: swimming lessons. After years of feeling only marginally comfortable in the water, I've decided to try to learn to swim properly – for exercise and, should it ever come to that, for survival. As I work on my breathing and strokes, I’ve also been thinking about why we swim in the first place. On the wall of the JCC on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I take my classes, there’s a quotation from the Talmud that lists things that par

After writing last week about the bitter feelings of regret that permeate Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I found myself wanting to explore this emotion from a different angle. My choice this week is "Feathers” by Raymond Carver, a story that is both odd and deeply moving. "Feathers” opens Carver's 1983 collection Cathedral. I have had this book for years and have read some of the stories, but I had never read this one until now. Carver, a master of the short s

Literature is full of characters who find their way to New York to remake themselves, from Jay Gatsby to Holly Golightly. In Toni Morrison's 1992 novel Jazz, Joe and Violet Trace arrive in Harlem during the Great Migration with hopes of moving past the violence and indignities of the rural South, only to find that the city offers no escape. I just finished reading Jazz and found it to be dazzling and thought-provoking, just like every other Toni Morrison novel I have read. I