Reassessing Rossellini

Restoration of Rome Open city, the director’s masterpiece, prompts a look at why he later retreated from the neorealism it introduced

Tangled Up in Dylan

The enduring appeal of a legendary American songwriter

Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968–2010By Greil Marcus Bob Dylan in America By Sean Wilentz

Why I Don’t Give Tips on How to Write

Ode to Joy

What makes us happy?

Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science By Sissela Bok

Girl Power

The enigma who ruled her world

Cleopatra: A Life By Stacy Schiff

From The Book of Knowledge

(The Children’s Encyclopedia/The Grolier Society, vol. 115, 1936)

Tour de Horse

A masterly retelling of a death on the Plains

The Killing of Crazy Horse By Thomas Powers

Man of Letters

A novelist finds his classic voice

Saul Bellow: Letters By Benjamin Taylor

City Ways

Urban visions past and future

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities By Witold Rybczynski

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

“The Horses” by Ted Hughes

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Amy Wetsch

Life, magnified

The Weight of a Stone

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

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