Letters of Note, a five-year-old blog run by Shaun Usher, is now a book. The blog offers correspondence “deserving of a wider audience” (as its tagline runs). When possible, Usher’s blog presents the letters in their original scans...
I was thirty-four years old when I met Léon Descoteaux, the famous tennis player, and stayed for a few days at his home in France, where he lived with his wife and children.
The summer after my first year in college, I worked in a paint factory. Packard Paint was a small operation—no more than thirty people worked there—tucked away in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a city of about thirty thousand.
The box dates from the late sixties, from a trip I took with my family to Ireland. I would have been eight or nine at the time. Of the trip itself I have one vivid memory. We are in a rental car, my father at the wheel, his attention...
