The Italians

A nation in name for only 150 years, Italy and her citizens nevertheless have a distinctive and beloved national character extending back for millennia -- a character beautifully captured in these evocative portraits by master photographer Leonard Freed, whose fifty-year career (he died in 2006) culminated in this album of a land and people whom he immediately fell in love with upon his first visit to New York's Little Italy.

May 25: On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born. Carver's poem "Luck," about a nine-year-old who wakes to an empty house and the leftovers of his parents' party, is all too autobiographical: "What luck, I thought. / Years later,…

Angry robots! Aren't they all? Well, not the line of fine science fiction and fantasy books that comes to readers under the rubric Angry Robot. In fact, their offerings…

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