"Brother, Can You Spare a Room," my essay about Thomas Butler Gunn's 1857 book The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses, appears in the 29 March 2009 issue of the New York Times Book Review. There's also a blog post about it on Paper Cuts. In buying the book itself, you have the option of the Cornell University Library facsimile, which has all the illustrations (browsable online here), or the Rutgers University Press reprint, which has an introduction, explanatory end notes, and a sample of the illustrations. The woodcuts featured with my essay in the Times illustrate (1) the joy of sharing a bed with people who lie "on their backs, with their knees making a pyramid of the bed-clothes . . . [and] moan all night like broken-hearted ring-doves," (2) German boarders, and (3) the Landlady Who Drinks.
Recently printed
- "Beer Buddies," Bookforum, February/March 2010
- "Terms of Infringement," The National (Abu Dhabi), 21 January 2010
- "Semantic Time Travel," New York Times Magazine, 10 January 2010
- "Against Camel Case," New York Times Magazine, 29 November 2009
- "Keats Speaks," New York Times Magazine, 1 November 2009
- "A Very Different Pakistan," New York Review of Books, 5 November 2009
- "It Happened One Decade," The New Yorker, 21 September 2009
- "Bootylicious," The New Yorker, 7 September 2009
- "Nice Work If You Can Get It," The National (Abu Dhabi), 2 July 2009
- "Toil and Trouble," New York Times Book Review, 28 June 2009
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About
- This blog is written by Caleb Crain. There's an email address for me at the top of my bio page. For older posts on this blog, please check the online archives. A selection of the blog's posts, spanning six years, has also been collected as a book, titled The Wreck of the Henry Clay.
Read your great article just after reading a series of Lafcadio Hearn sketches: "Complaint of a Creole Boarding-House Keeper"; "The Boarder's Reply"; "A Kentucky Colonel Renting Rooms"; "The Restless Boarder"; "Furnished Rooms" -- etc., etc....
Posted by: Jonathan Taylor | Monday, 30 March 2009 at 09:18 PM