A holiday tradition in the Netherlands involving blackface has sparked a debate about race, the legacy of slavery, and the vestiges of colonialism. Emily Raboteau told the story in our Winter 2014 magazine.
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...
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...
“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...
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?