The Fies Files

That's where I'll be; how about you? Registration is now open for “Comics & Medicine: The Sequential Art of Illness,” an interna...

Mr. Clemens and his family frequently traveled overseas and lived for two brief stretches in Florence, Italy. In 1904, in a futile attempt t...

Bite-sized morsels which, today, won't even add up to a light meal . . . * * * Yesterday I saw a TV commercial that struck me as the str...

Here's a compilation of a few videos I've come across recently that I enjoyed and thought you might, too. A tour of Pixar Studios, c...

Karen's away on a business trip most of this week, leaving me to make my usual mischief while she's gone: eat garbage, trash the kit...

In 1899, a London acquaintance named T. Douglas Murray asked Mr. Clemens to write the Introduction for an English translation of the trial r...

I hadn't planned on writing anything about the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. I didn't think I had anything new or in...

Today's insult is more of a back-handed compliment. While living briefly in Vienna, the Clemens family hired a maid who stuck her nose i...

Today's subject is a London book reviewer who, Mr. Clemens felt, prized proper grammar at the expense of clarity and style. I suppose we...

Today's subject is Clemens's attorney William Hamersly, who advised him poorly in several matters, including contracts with the afor...

As mentioned, I'm reading the massive first volume of the thrice-massiver Autobiography of Mark Twain, and about a hundred pages in find...

Once in a while, my wife Karen and I like to pick some nearby small town to explore. Some are so close we simply take them for granted; othe...

Suzette Chan of Sequential Tart , a website that has been very good to me over the years, has written a really nice review that touches on ...