SPOTLIGHT

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

By Jonathan Liebson Wednesday, January 8, 2025

SPOTLIGHT

The Writer in the Family

The fiction of E. L. Doctorow gave a young man hope of connecting his father and his literary hero

By Jonathan Liebson Wednesday, January 8, 2025

Portrait of the Artist

Mimi Jung

Defense Mechanisms

Smarty Pants Podcast

Once Upon a Time in Manchester

Hopwood DePree on the quest to restore his ancestral English seat

Web Essays

Once Upon Another Fraught Time …

The power of Yiddish children’s literature

Ulysses at 100

It Happened One Day in June

Why Ulysses is as vital as ever— compelling, complex, and direct

Ulysses at 100

For the Joy of Joyce

Abandon the notion of high-minded seriousness and simply enter into the novel’s flow

Essays

The Bomb Next Door

Eighty years into the atomic age, U.S. nuclear power reactors have produced several million tons of radioactive waste—and we still have no idea how to dispose of it

Fiction

This Is Your Face

Book Reviews

A Whale of a Story

The parallel lives of   Moby-Dick’s creator and the historian who rescued him from obscurity

Asturias Days

Birthday Boy

Read Me a Poem

“The Horses” by Ted Hughes

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Portrait of the Artist

Amy Wetsch

Life, magnified

Article

The Weight of a Stone

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

Asturias Days

New Year, Old Year

Read Me a Poem

“The Horses” by Edwin Muir

Poems read aloud, beautifully

Smarty Pants Podcast

The Snow Maiden

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

Smarty Pants Podcast

Ho Ho Horror

Why not make this Christmas a little darker?

Asturias Days

A Story for Christmas

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current issue

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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)
Book Reviews

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Article

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loading

Only rarely did the outside world intrude on an idyllic Connecticut childhood, but in the tumultuous 1960s, that intrusion included an encounter with evil

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Celebrating 20 years of poetry in the Scholar

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Winter 2025