Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry: Joan Murray and Christopher Gilbert
Lisa Russ Spaar takes a second look at second, posthumous books by poets Joan Murray and Christopher Gilbert....
California Sons: Miriam Pawel’s “The Browns of California”
Jake Wertz reviews “The Browns of California,” a four-generation biography of the Brown family and a portrait of the state they shaped....
Cold War Cold Files
A Hungarian author confronts his parents’ Cold War past....
Writing Algeria
Kamel Daoud is a brilliant, indeed dazzling, thinker: his sharp turns in thought and language, as well as his subject matter, gave me motion sickness....
A Polish Snow Globe: On Adam Mickiewicz’s “Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania”
Josh Billings revels in Bill Johnston’s “meticulous” translation of “Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania” by the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz....
In the In-Between: Identity, Place, and Nuance in Anita Felicelli’s “Love Songs for a Lost Continent”
"Love Songs for a Lost Continent" by Anita Felicelli, her debut short story collection, is a marvel of nuance, with each story complicating the narrative....
Asylum, Again: Why We Need to Stop Punishing the Mentally Ill
As more and more prisons become warehouses for the mentally ill, is it time to go back to the asylum?...
Giving Voice to the Various
Ben Fountain takes a look at his country and describes it in dazzling language....
The Opiate of the Masses? Not So Fast.
In "Why We Need Religion," Stephen T. Asma argues that religion answers to a deep emotional need and therefore plays an irreplaceable role in societies....
Tales of Monstrous Women: “The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter” and “European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman” by Theodora Goss
While delivering two rollicking tales of adventure, Theodora Goss also has something important to say about women and monsters....
American Idiots, American Killers, and the American Graphic Novel
Paul Morton reviews Jules Feiffer's latest graphic novel, "The Ghost Script."...
The Biggest US City That Shouldn’t Exist
An entertaining history of one of the United States’s most improbable cities....
