Women in profile reading on the beach

The Great Summer Read

Why do we persist in this often futile literary quest?

Alexis Granwell

Sculpting Paintings

Illustration of a vintage blue car against a yellow background

Stick Shifts and Safety Belts

How car culture swallowed America

A Breath of Air

An Excerpt from William Wordsworth’s Prelude

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Pink daisies facing the sunset

June: A Sonnet

A Mexican Mosaic

Carlos Chávez’s Indian Symphony

The Best and Worst of Times

A weekend trip exposes France’s contradictions

Dawn Holder

End of the Anthropocene

Getting Smart

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 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

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