For 30 years, an unpublished manuscript about slaves and sailors in the Caribbean has been an underground sensation. Why is it reaching print only now. Samizdat Sensations
The private lives and personal habits of the great Russian writers are fascinating to me. They are held up as these great geniuses with their lofty thoughts and doorstop novels. But it turns out they are just like us. Tolstoy had to eat boiled pears to ease his digestive troubles. Bulgakov was obsessed with having enough pairs of socks. And Chekhov made his own creosote vapor inhalations. (OK, not everyone does this. But we all have weird cures we inflict on ourselves when we’re ill. Right?) By knowing how odd—and how ordinary—these writers were, we can feel closer to them and, more importantly, to their work, so often wrongly characterized as inaccessible
