In Search of a Great Modernist

Do Proust’s final days illuminate his novel?

Proust at the Majestic: The Last Days of the Author Whose Book Changed Paris By Richard Davenport-Hines

Tiny Tomes

Literature in miniature has a 500-year history, but what’s the appeal of a volume too small to read?

Response to Our Spring Issue

Summer

Rio: Feckless and Reckless

Story Time

The Man Who Got His Way

John Hammond, scion of white privilege, helped integrate popular music

The Ordinariness of AIDS

Can a disease that tells us so much about ourselves ever be anything but extraordinary?

The Sack of Baghdad

The U.S. invasion of Iraq has turned cultural icons into loot and archaeological sites into ruins

Miles from Nowhere

On a return trip to the wilderness of British Columbia, the author revisits a rough and exquisite landscape

The Epic Viking Saga of the Everyday

Eleanor Barraclough on the ordinary people of Norse history

All Talk

Ease of communication will not save us

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apartby Nicholas Carr

Burned

“The White Heart of God” by Jack Gilbert

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Paige Ledom

Out of the ordinary

The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend

How a classic paean to the honest virtues of a Maine fisherman obscured several ugly truths

Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Unionby Richard Carwardine

“The Terrorist, He’s Watching” by Wislawa Szymborska

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Keepers of the Old Ways

Eliot Stein on the people keeping cultural traditions alive

Above the River of Your Longing

Two new prompts

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