“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

Casa Gorín

“The Purse-Seine” by Robinson Jeffers

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by Marlene L. Daut

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

Birthday Boy

“The Horses” by Ted Hughes

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Amy Wetsch

Life, magnified

The Bard of Suburbia

John Updike’s obsession with ordinary life made him the writer by whom we came to know ourselves

Updike By Adam Begley

19th Nervous Breakdown

The struggle to keep it together

My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind By Scott Stossel

Cure for Helmet Hair?

A Danger to Ourselves

Tough on other species, too

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History By Elizabeth Kolbert

What Killed My Sister?

The answer—schizophrenia—only leads to more perplexing questions

Whores de Combat

In search of adventure and engagement

Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War By Amanda Vaill

Eight Hours a Slave

Plangent Encounters

The Fabulist

A literary critic’s ugly deception

The Double Life of Paul De Man By Evelyn Barish

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