In terms of scale and scope of destruction, the series of floods that struck the Mississippi River system in the spring of 1927 (now known simply as “the great flood of 1927”) is regarded as one of the nation’s greatest natural disasters...
As soon becomes apparent, The Dream of the Great American Novel simply isn’t aimed at the common reader or even at many uncommon ones. The grateful audience for this book will be other scholars and teachers of American literature, who will...
It is through Edwidge Danticat that Haiti emerges beyond the illusion, and her fiction and nonfiction open our eyes to the history and complexity of the island.
Merwin’s awesome range, intensity, and feral strangeness are evident in a new two-volume Library of America edition, beautifully edited by J. D. McClatchy. Nearly 1,500 pages in all, it represents an oeuvre so large as to make Robert Lowell...
It is the duty of the creator of any book app to assume that whatever sense of immersion we enjoy in a conventional book can be improved upon. More things to become immersed in, the logic goes, means more immersion, which means a better...
Offered up by blurbers with the best of intentions, the immediacy implicit in the description like a novel suggests that the book on hand can be engaged with as art rather than as fact, so realist it’s not real; a story rather than the...
Rich championed just about every major liberal social cause of our time—human rights, gay rights, feminism, and environmental reform. Sometimes Later Poems: Selected and New,1971–2012 reads like a diary of them.
Wolitzer’s nine novels for adults all explore, in some combination, modern womanhood, family, relationships, and creativity—subjects with which she is intimately familiar as a woman, wife, mother, novelist, and daughter of a novelist.
The trick in producing a spiritual memoir spurred by disease is circumventing the fact that you have become a cliché: Of course you discovered or rediscovered your god during a grievous bout with cancer—doesn’t everyone?