William Mills

Latest by William Mills in Chronicles

• Correspondence

  March 2001

  Gifts From Afar

  It was just before Christmas, and for some reason I thought the fishing would be good in the Dominican Republic during that time of the year. I had no information to that effect, but a friend, who does not fish, spoke favorably of DR.

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• Correspondence

  February 2000

  Gone Fishing

  Maybe it's the increasing need to find a replacement for what America once was, or just the plain joy of sports fishing, but whatever die real motive, I found myself headed for Costa Rica in October.

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• Vital Signs

  November 1999

  Wisconsin Apocalypse

  Since I was going to fish in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, I decided like any bookish person to read some books about the place. I expect I own all of Gordon Weaver's ten or twelve books, and I went digging through them again to sec which ones were set in Wisconsin.

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• Reviews

  January 1999

  Confidants of Blood

  This troubling memoir of James Dickey by his son, Christopher, is troubling as well for me to review because I knew James Dickey a little, and I greatly admire his work.

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• Reviews

  October 1998

  Beyond the Crossing

  As in the earlier works, the reader is turned every which way but loose by the emotional power of the fiction; also, as before, the English language is torqued and pressured to yield new veins of gold.

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• Correspondence

  April 1997

  Bulgarian Autumn, Part II

  For travelers drawn to the cradles of civilization, Bulgaria offers a good alternative to the crowds of Greece. One can revel in the Greek and Roman occupations that followed the Thracians.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  April 1997

  James Dickey, R.I.P.

  James Dickey, one of the stars in the American firmament, died this past January. For certain of us, he was the most powerful, the most loved, poet from the 1960's onward.

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• Correspondence

  March 1997

  Bulgarian Autumn, Part I

  Rather than dropping out of the sky into Bulgaria at the Sophia airport as I did, travelers would be better advised to enter by other ways. Driving up from Greece through the Rhodope mountains would be one appealing way.

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• Correspondence

  January 1997

  Down Ecuador Way, Part II

  Part of the charm of Latin American visual arts for me is the absence of extreme polarities in the continuum anchored by folk art on one end and fine art on the other. A continuum often seems not to exist in "First World Countries."

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• Correspondence

  December 1996

  Down Ecuador Way, Part I

  Latin elections are such vibrant theater, unlike our plastic-coated, high-tech soap operas, I thought I might catch the presidential election in Ecuador this year. Besides, there was an off-again, on-again war with Peru to give an edge to the trip.

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• Reviews

  September 1996

  The Story of Love

  Octavio Paz, who was 82 when he wrote this book, asks in his preface, "Wasn't it a little ridiculous, at the end of my days, to write a book about love?" The answer is a resounding "no."

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• Correspondence

  August 1996

  A Jug of Wine, A New Zealand Trout

  With Missouri frozen solid for two February weeks in a row, naturally one's thoughts turn to the Southern Hemisphere. There were some hot spots in our beloved country even this winter—Miz Hillary was testifying before a federal grand jury, the Rose Law Firm was smoking, and Mr. Starr was building a few fires of his own.

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• Correspondence

  June 1996

  Letter From the Crimea: The Price of Folly

  On the night train from Kiev to Simferopol I share a compartment with Volodymyr Prytula, a Crimean journalist. Called "Vova" by his friends, this slender man with a Zhivagoesque mustache is my sole contact in the Crimea.

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• Reviews

  May 1996

  Swimming Against the Tide

  Mario Vargas Llosa, the winner of the 1991 T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, has fashioned a provocative symmetry in this memoir. He writes of growing up in Peru and Bolivia, bringing his life up to the point where he leaves for Europe at age 22, all the while alternating chapters that cover his candidacy for president of Peru in 1990.

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• Correspondence

  March 1996

  Letter From Caucasia Georgia on My Mind

  Getting from the Crimea to the Republic of Georgia presents several problems. I had been told that one way was to get to Trabzon on the Black Sea Coast of Turkey, and then take a boat to the coastal town of Batumi in Georgia.

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• Correspondence

  October 1995

  The Attraction Offshore

  With the government seizing at least half our incomes each year and the "multi-diversity" crowd sowing seeds of anger and disunity that could well lead to civil war down the road, I hear more and more people talking of places to relocate themselves and their capital: New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, and Costa Rica.

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• Vital Signs

  February 1995

  Remembering Cleanth Brooks

  Cleanth Brooks, one of the giants of literary criticism, died last May 10. He was 87 years old. He taught thousands of us how to read a poem or a story. Some he taught over a half-century by way of the classroom, some in his numerous public lectures across this country and abroad, and many of us through his textbooks.

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• Reviews

  December 1994

  Negative Capability

  So many things have been said in praise of McCarthy's work that it is hard not to sound like an echo. Inevitably, the reviewer notes the energy and grace of his style, and there is no gainsaying that.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  March 1992

  Howard Nemerov, R.I.P.

  Howard Nemerov, one of our country's titans of literature, died last July. He published his first book shortly after Wodd War II, and during the next 44 years a stream of 26 books garnered for him the country's most prestigious awards.

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• View

  December 1989

  An Imitation: A Short Story

  Hawkins was doing his version of an Iranian student who had missed eight weeks of class, yet wanted an "A" in the calculus course.

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