Martha Foley’s Granddaughters
What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett
By Jay Neugeboren
July 18, 2024To Catch a Sunset
Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love
By Sandra Beasley
July 11, 2024The Next New Thing
In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before
By Witold Rybczynski
July 4, 2024Imperfecta
Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing
By Pamela Haag
June 20, 2024The Widower’s Lament
After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss
By Steven G. Kellman
March 4, 2024The World at the End of a Line
The grandson of one of American literature’s Lost Generation novelists reflects on his namesake’s love of the sea
By John Dos Passos Coggin
April 13, 2023The Goddess Complex
A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking
By Elizabeth Kadetsky
March 2, 2023Last Rites and Comic Flights
A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity
By Pico Iyer
July 28, 2022The Believer
When nobody would touch Joyce’s manuscript, Sylvia Beach stepped in
By Keri Walsh
June 15, 2022Capital of Willows
On a trip to North Korea, a writer remembers his troubled father, a victim of the “Forgotten War”
By Eben Wood
Monday, September 7, 2015Test of Faith
The Roman Catholic Church may forgive us our sins—but can it be forgiven for its own?
By Mark Edmundson
Monday, September 7, 2015Talk of the Town
At the Concord Lyceum, Emerson tried out his lectures on his neighbors
By Robert A. Gross
Monday, June 8, 2015Matters of Taste
A work of literature and a bottle of wine require similar skills of their respective critics
By Paul Lukacs
Monday, June 8, 2015The Wandering Years
Read the travel journals of literary icon Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died yesterday at 101
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Monday, June 8, 2015My Mother’s Yiddish
The music of my childhood was a language filled with endearments and rebukes, and frequent misunderstandings
By Phyllis Rose
Monday, June 8, 2015Net Gains
Nabokov’s profitable summer chasing butterflies and settling scores in the Utah mountains
By Robert Roper
Monday, June 8, 2015Saigon Summer
A spy’s daughter remembers the haunting unreality of embassy life in South Vietnam before the fall