House of English

Skeletons in the Closet

Six literary haunted houses to visit this October

“Sonnet” by Elizabeth Bishop

Poems read aloud, beautifully

A Pioneering Appetite

The story of America’s first culinary celebrity

The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard John Birdsall

Gangsters in Love

Revisiting Sergio Leone’s 1984 classic, Once Upon a Time in America

Do You Believe in Magic?

A global history of our oldest—and most maligned—practice

Verifiable Truths

The thinkers who tried to strip metaphysics from philosophy

The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle David Edmonds

Out on a Limb

Turning Leaves and Turning Pages

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

Cudillero

“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 Christopheby 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

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