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...
Once the fastest-growing city in America and its fourth largest, the cradle of Motown music is now the country’s leader in urban decline. Its population peaked in 1950; since then, it has lost nine of ten manufacturing jobs and 63 percent...
The title of Ron Rash’s compelling new collection of stories, Nothing Gold Can Stay, comes from Robert Frost’s evocative poem pondering the bittersweet knowledge of life’s impermanence.
“The most important thing of course in his childhood was the loss of his fingers when he was thirteen.” My friend David is telling me about his father, Percy Yutar. We’re sitting in a sunny apartment in the neighborhood of Tamboerskloof...
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.
I do dearly despise being late, but here I am, three minutes behind my time. Uncharacteristic and a mighty poor example for you youngsters. Patience is much appreciated and aren’t you a lovely, varied crowd? Big group, too, for my first...
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...
