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...
Artist Gabriel Orozco doesn’t necessarily want to disappoint, nor does he want to fail, not in a literal sense. Rather, he wants to protect his right to be a beginner.
My father was never one to complain. On the morning of the day he died, an ulcer he’d suffered from for years, and left untreated, ruptured and began to bleed. Two days later I met with the town coroner. He told me the end had been painless...
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...
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.
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...
Once, more than half a century ago, he was the handsomest man in the world. A radiant man. It was a matter of bearing, of voice and gesture and timing. He had that high, buttery baritone, nothing special really, except, he says, “I knew how...