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 Union by 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

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

Taming Grief

On poems by Kevin Young

Prince of Peptides

Kalawar

Who really killed Abdur, an Afghan goatherd-turned-informant?

Letter from Afghanistan: A Gathering Menace

Traveling with U.S. troops gives insights into the recent massacre

Memory and Forgetting

Response to Our Winter 2012 Issue

Death by Treacle

Sentiment surfaces fast and runs hot in public life, dumbing it down and crippling intimacy in private life

Privacy

Dirty Books

A publisher’s lifelong battle against censorship

The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age By Richard Seaver

The Universe as Kitchen

Cosmic ovens, nebular refrigerators, and the predictive power of physical law

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