A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
April Issue
Why I Love: Re-reading Books. And a recipe for Jane Austen’s White Soup
To me, re-reading a story you’ve loved, after a distance of a few years or even decades, is delicious. (And so is this soup!)
Fiction: Nipmuck Set
The new snow forgot all boundaries between land and water.
Letter from the Editor: January
We’re all gleaners, finding beauty and meaning and sustenance in the unlikely, the odd, the overlooked. We’re all magpies, lining our nests with beauty where we find it.
Francis Bacon: The Essays
“I doe now publish my Essayes; which, of all my other works, have been most Currant: For that, as it seems, they come home, to Mens Businesse, and Bosomes.”
Syllabub Cookies
Suffice to say that Syllabub, sometimes a drink, sometimes a desssert, is a very very old recipe. It’s the sort of thing Old Fezziwig would serve at his holiday party in A Christmas Carol. It’s the sort of thing David Copperfield would serve at his bachelors’ dinner party, the party which resulted in the best description of being drunk in all of literature.
Thinking Makes it So: Platon Karataev and Epictetus
The harder his position became and the more terrible the future, the more independent of that position in which he found himself were the joyful and comforting thoughts, memories, and imaginings that came to him
Wildflowers in the Fall
The scenes of fall wildflowers seem accidental, and because we’re often alone with them, more intimate.
Starling Arcadia
“We cling to narratives of our association with a local ecosystem, and want to believe that we fight as hard as we can against that ecosystem’s eventual disappearance under a light-blotting alien invasion as if it were our own lives and works at stake. Part of that may be delusory – this ecosystem is not our own, has no love for us, and it is our own force that keeps it from eradicating our efforts and our lifeways.”
Why I love: William Carlos Williams (on his birthday)
His work and his career as a writer seem to embody so much of what I value in art: a desire to shape the way you see the world around you through creativity, but always grounded in an appreciation of the ordinary, the every day. His writing and his thoughts on the writers of his time are full of generosity, sincerity, and a constant questioning examination of life and art.
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