In a time when publishers practically cross their fingers and flip a coin to determine whether a book is called a memoir or a novel, it is reassuring that the loyalty oath to speak the truth is still upheld among Truth’s most vocal... Read More

Just as every retailer employs the soft-sell art of window dressing—placing an enticing item to beckon the customer within—this author opens his charmingly earnest and flawless memoir with this true story: When Jackie Kennedy began... Read More

It is a paradox well worth repeating that no single author is ever quite master of his or her literary material: words outwit and outgrow their writers’ best intentions. (That’s why poetry is not journalism.) This humbling wisdom is... Read More

For serious readers of poetry, this author is its epicenter of literary criticism. Throughout her tenure at Harvard University as Professor of English, from thoughtful reviews to her several studies on Yeats, Stevens, Seamus Heaney, to... Read More

In England (where the author enjoys higher name recognition as Oxford University’s Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature, author of biographies of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather among others, and a Commander of the British Empire... Read More

Consider the fateful paradoxes of exile that haunted this poet’s fragile yet tenacious lifework. Born Paul Antschel in 1920 to a prosperous Jewish family in Bukovina (grimly ceded to Romania in 1940), he adopted the name Celan after... Read More

Though the coyotes that so magically appear and disappear to the startled residents of this small community near Albuquerque, looming like silent totems, are not quite trespassers, a few locals bluster in letters to the newspaper that... Read More

The “me” of this time-traveling valentine to China is Aysha Silvermintz. Twenty-two a native New Yorker her degree in English literature at Columbia University still incomplete owing to a manic interlude in St. Lukes psych ward Aysha... Read More