Robert Burns is a favorite poet of mine. I don’t know which came first, my fascination with Scotland or with Burns, but one feeds the other and I am besotted.
Through his poems, Burns takes me to Scotland — “Yon wild mossy mountains sae…
The 19th century was a great century for writers. If I could only bring one century of writing with me to a desert island, I would choose the nineteenth without hesitation. Not only for the literature but for the essays: the essayists of the 19th century were wide-ranging in…
Nina Sankovitch is the author of four books of nonfiction, with a fifth coming out in 2025 about the life of a…
The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama is a quietly compelling novel. It tells of the passage of a boy out of childhood: the year is 1937 and Stephen is a Chinese boy sent to recuperate in his family’s Japanese beach house following a withering bout of tuberculosis…
Edgar Allan Poe wrote impassioned love letters to Annie Richmond, the married woman with whom he carried out an intense but platonic relationship, crying out “Why am I not with you now darling that I might sit by your side, press your dear hand in mine, & look deep down…
The Professor and the Housekeeper by Yoko Ogawa has a beautiful rhythm to it, easy-going, fluid, and peaceful. The characters are well-defined and the situation they are in is compelling. But the three devices Ogawa employs to keep her plot going, the beauty…
Always have a book with you.
Read while waiting.Read while eating.Read while exercising.Read before bed.Read before getting out of bed.
These were the top 10 stories published by Nina Sankovitch; you can also dive into yearly archives: 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.