History, Alive and Well

A writer’s tour of the Soviet world, 30 years after its collapse

Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe by Rory MacLean

Billy Joe Wardlow

This Man Should Not Be Executed

Billy Joe Wardlow murdered a man, but mitigating facts say he should not pay for that crime with his life

A Biographer Looks Back

A noted practitioner reveals her tricks of the trade

Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me by Deirdre Bair

University of Virginia

A Founding Class

Two new studies of the man from Monticello

Thomas Jefferson’s Education by Alan Taylor Revolutionary Brothers by Tom Chaffin

Sailors Celebrating

The Greatest Sexual Revolution

How World War II prefigured the ’60s

Elizabeth Bishop and Louise Crane

Questions of Inspiration

Should we try to see the poet in her poetry?

Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop by Thomas Travisano

Stuttgart station after the war

Changing Trains

In Stuttgart, in 1943, my mother escaped bombs falling on the station. Has her terror expressed itself in me?

WIP Photo Opener

Desert Time

Walking through Negev

Lydia Davis

The Barber of Language

A new collection from a celebrated prose stylist

Essays One by Lydia Davis

Parade in Ukraine

Kiev: New Leader, Old Troubles

Dysfunction still prevails in Ukraine, especially in the war-torn east; for the rest of the country, the challenges are financial.

Lindsey Weber

Relationships that define us

In the Endless Arctic Light

A journey to the far north of Norway means confronting our changing climate

The Bears

“Faustina, or, Rock Roses” by Elizabeth Bishop

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Family/History

David Levering Lewis digs into his own origin story

In the Lions’ Studio

A new dual biography turns the lens on the towering architects of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equationby Kenneth Turan

Such People

“My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer” by Mark Strand

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Kyung Kim

Far over the misty mountains

The Fair Fields

Only rarely did the outside world intrude on an idyllic Connecticut childhood, but in the tumultuous 1960s, that intrusion included an encounter with evil

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