American Notes News Today

Dickens’s unprecedented celebrity made him the most popular novelist of his century—but the author of Great Expectations, Bleak House, A Christmas Carol, and dozens of other works was more than just a writer.

Federal American Vernacular Portraits, 1790s to 1840s.

Bill Keller, former editor of the New York Times, has documented the dysfunction the US criminal justice system. Now he watches with horror as UK prisons head the same way

The New York of Charles Dickens’s first visit remains recognizable. It is still, as Dickens observed, “a great emporium of commerce” and a “place of general resort.”

We have quite a few model (building) enthusiasts on the forum so I thought I would share some images from my visit last Saturday to a nice model building exhibition. Here in the Netherlands there are

Nature Writing from Inside America’s prisons. Inmates unlearn the language of excuses and relearn a sense of self and awareness of the natural world.

The event that sets Wilmingtons Cucalorus Film Festival apart from other festivals is the one night dedicated to merging sight, sound and movement.

Writing a column is akin to writing and posting love letters without waiting for the beloved to respond. Its not just about passion, inspiration, ideas, speech; its about birthing language that resonates not just with lovers and the choir but will challenge haters, bigots, and deniers of truth.

Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com. Rābiʿa al Basri, an 8th century Sufi poet and mystic and Islam’s first female saint,...

It is one of Dickens’ best loved novels and an exposé of the class system, but the book’s depiction of women has proved divisive.