Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by 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

New Year, Old Year

“The Horses” by Edwin Muir

Poems read aloud, beautifully

The Snow Maiden

Our final episode of 2018 is a send-off to the solstice

Ho Ho Horror

Why not make this Christmas a little darker?

To Accept What Cannot Be Helped

At 80, a woman with a fatal disease knows she doesn’t want to die in the hospital and discovers, with her family, what that really means

Forgiveness

The Seduction

After years of favoring the endurance-test approach to teaching literature, a professor focuses on how to make books spark to life for her students

Adonis

Expatriate’s Lament

The Passionate Encounter

A noted midcentury critic has much to say in his journal about his fellow writers and the literary world they shared

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

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