The Excerpt: The face of an old gypsy woman looks out from inside a covered wagon facing the campfire. The reflection of a new moon ripples in a puddle of rainwater in the forest near the camp. On the floor, mountains of worn-out village shoes need mending. A dim oil lamp lights the cobbler’s hovel. …
The Excerpt: I gave the old man some money and went out into the street. Gedali and I parted, and I went back to the railroad station. There at the station, on the propaganda train of the First Cavalry, I was greeted by the sparkle of hundreds of lights, the enchanted glitter of the radio …
The Passage: “I could!” Mendel shouted, and banged his fist against his head. “I could, Benchik!” he yelled with all his might, staggering like an epileptic. “This courtyard around me, in which I have served a sentence for the first half my life. This courtyard has seen me be the father of my children, the …
The Example: David drove up from Cannes in the dusk. The wind had fallen and he left the car in the usual place and walked up the path to where the light came out onto the patio and the garden. Marita came out of the doorway and walked toward him. — Ernest Hemingway Analysis: Such …
The Passage: I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking up and not …
On Christmas Eve 1914, in the middle of the blood and horror that was the first World War, there occurred an unplanned truce. It began in the darkness on Christmas Eve night, when the men began singing Christmas carols. Voices raising in the cold night, sparse and few at first but growing ever stronger. The soldiers of both sides sang together …
Read more “The Christmas Eve Truce, Pt. 2 — The Horrible Side of the Story”