Alberto Manguel

Our Concentration Camps: An Open Letter

This generation will be remembered for having allowed concentration camps for children to be built in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” This is happening here and now, but not in our names.

Our Concentration Camps

This generation will be remembered for having allowed for concentration camps for children to be built on “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” This is happening here and now, but not in our names.

Dante’s Dogs

Angry, greedy, savage, mad, cruel: these are the qualities that Dante seems to see in dogs and applies to the inhabitants of Hell.

Conversations with the Dead

Reading has always been for me a sort of practical cartography. Like other readers, I have an absolute trust in the capability that reading has to map my world. I know that on a page somewhere on my shelves, staring down at me now, is the question I’m struggling with today, put into words long ago, perhaps, by someone who could not have known of my existence.

The Unanswerable Question

In the same way that we cannot deliberately, faithfully construct a dream while asleep, awake we are unable to put into words the complexity of the universe. Perhaps the only success to which the writer can aspire in dream-telling is to make the reader believe that the characters themselves believe the dream to be a dream.