Poet of the Extreme

A noted novelist considers the life of an American master

Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster

Holding the Reigns

Four queens condemned to live in interesting times

When Women Ruled the World: Making the Renaissance in Europe by Maureen Quilligan

Whatever Happened to Frankie King?

A tale of Brooklyn, basketball, brothers, and madness

At the Corner of Byron and Shelley

Poetry and philhellenism at the Greek bicentennial

Mumbai: A Nation Betrayed, A People Forsaken

An existential crisis

Five Poems
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Autumn 2021

On Our Knees

What the history of a gesture can tell us about Black creative power

The Shadowy and the Sensory
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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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