Victor Franks, because he worked nights, and perhaps because his metabolism, as his ex-wife once suggested, was slower than average, did not function very well in the morning. He was a man who lacked the few simple habits that breed contentment. 

Kafka apparently “got a childlike pleasure” from the idea of writing a series of thrifty travel guides. What if he had really done it?

Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me turns fifty.I am gazing, as I write, at a black-and-white photograph of Richard Fariña with his wife, Mimi (née Baez) Fariña, taken backstage at the Newport Folk Festival nine months before…