Nessus at Noon

Collateral Damage

The Civil War only enhanced George Whitman’s soldierly satisfaction; for his brother Walt, however, the horrors halted an outpouring of great poetry

My Bright Abyss

I never felt the pain of unbelief until I believed. But belief itself is hardly painless.

The High Road to Narnia

C. S. Lewis and his friend J. R. R. Tolkien believed that truths are universal and that stories reveal them

Cal & Liz & Ted & Sylvia

The corresponding prose of midcentury poets

Letters of Ted Hughesselected and edited by Christopher Reid, Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A Passion for Architecture

Nuggets from a critical gold mine

On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change By Ada Louise Huxtable

Let Me Count the Ways

Are we getting more obsessive or more compulsive about diagnosing?

Obsession: A History By Lennard J. Davis

Lucid Madness

A massacre of Apache women and children, and the difficulties of telling their story

Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History By Karl Jacoby

Of Time and the Camera

An art critic and historian turns his attention to contemporary photography

Why Photography Matters Now as Art as Never Before By Michael Fried

The Art of Human Surveillance

The Writer in the Family

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

The Weight of a Stone

Searching for stability in an erratic world led Oliver Sacks and other writers to the realms of geology

Double Exposure

On our first memories

Verde

Learning a foreign language isn’t just about improving cognitive function—it can teach us to sense the world anew

Magic Men

Aging Out

Many of us do not go gentle into that good night

Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Ageby James Chappel

Under a Spell Everlasting

Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, published a century ago, tells of a world unable to free itself from the cataclysm of war

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

Ideology as Anatomy

How shifting ideas about women’s bodies have affected their lives

Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Partsby Helen King

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