“Why is most contemporary poetry so dull? It is a measure of the author’s generosity that when this challenge is issued—midway into a collection of essays and reviews of modern poetry—it seems less like a firebomb lobbed at the... Read More

“Just as the hand, held before the eye, can hide the tallest mountain, so the routine of everyday life can keep us from seeing the vast radiance of and the secret wonders that fill the world.” Eighteenth century, Hasidic. Manhattan... Read More

The Millers of these twenty tales belong to Jesse Miller, fiftyish, Jewish, husband, adulterer, academic, writer, son and lover, a sardonic, voluble witness to his own life. Told in brief, interconnected stories, the novel traces... Read More

“This is a book about neighbors: not about who our neighbors are but about who we imagine them to be.” In his introduction to Mutual Impressions, Stavans points out that our social concepts revolve mainly around how different our... Read More

After young Tatia’s mother dies, her father remarries a woman with “eyes as sharp as needles and a soul as thin as a thread.” Poor Tatia is left with only her mother’s parting words and a rag doll named Drooga to protect her. The... Read More

In the vein of the “Chicken Soup” series, Mohler has put together a book that examines the gay soul in the context of positive homosexual identity formation. The author was motivated to write the book because of a lack of knowledge... Read More

Certain photographs, by virtue of composition, light or subject, have the ability to draw a viewer into another world, to make one yearn for intimate knowledge of the photographer and the subject, to cause a kind of minor obsession of... Read More

“There is no miracle greater than love,” write the authors of the latest in the very successful Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Chicken Soup for the Soul arrived in stores in 1993, and since then, over seven million copies have... Read More