How to see the world, by Nathaniel Hawthorne March 15, 2023 Sitting before a lake one summer, Nathaniel Hawthorne took a newspaper from his pocket and began to read. His object was not to catch up on the news but to play a trick—to lull nature into a false sense of security, to make it think he was not perceiving the world around him, so he could look up suddenly and see the trees for how they really are. Read More
Marion Turner on The Wife of Bath March 01, 2023 Medieval women led varied, interesting, risky lives. They worked in a wide variety of jobs, were economically active, and were often independent. This is the world in which Chaucer’s Wife of Bath–one of the most famous and enduring female characters in English literature–was born. Read More
In Dialogue: What is misunderstood about Blackness? February 27, 2023 For decades, ‘Blackness’ has been a crucial political and cultural category that grounds a public discourse on cherishing a robust historical tradition and systemically uprooting white supremacy. Read More
Words for the Heart February 14, 2023 Words for the Heart is a captivating treasury of emotion terms drawn from some of India’s earliest classical languages. Read More
What the Thunder Said February 07, 2023 When T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. “But,” as Jed Rasula writes, “The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Read More
Thoreau and the business of distraction February 04, 2023 In his early years, the writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau was a restless young man with a romantic temperament, casting about for a way to make a living without giving up his freedom. Read More
The Wife of Bath January 20, 2023 Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers—from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Read More
An excerpt from The Aesthetic Cold War January 17, 2023 In “Africa and Her Writers,” a feisty Chinua Achebe begins by proclaiming, “Art for art’s sake is just another piece of deodorized dog shit.” The joke, of course, comes at high modernism’s expense, and he was neither the first nor the last figure from decolonizing regions of the world to rail against writing for a privileged few. Read More
The Aesthetic Cold War January 04, 2023 How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. Read More
Daisy Hay on Dinner with Joseph Johnson January 01, 2023 Joseph Johnson was an extraordinary man, who brought together an extraordinary range of people. But Dinner with Joseph Johnson is not straightforwardly a biography of him—or even a book about him. Read More
What I mean by landscape orientation October 05, 2022 I entered without words: Poems has been described as “landscape oriented” in every sense. Originally a photographic term, now applied to a horizontal page, landscape orientation is, for me, a poetics. A poetics that begins by questioning the term “landscape” itself. Read More
Word watch September 12, 2022 Ever have the feeling that you should know something, but you don’t yet know what it is? But wait, if it is unknown to you, then how do you know that you should know it? Read More
Rediscovering Melville and Mumford August 22, 2022 The darkest times often feel unprecedented, but as almost any historian will tell you, they’re not. Read More
A student’s guide to a good-enough year August 18, 2022 As schools begin to stabilize from COVID-19 disruptions, the pressures that have long been accumulating on students show no signs of slowing. Employment uncertainties, rising financial burdens, and unrelenting competition have layered on top of decades of cultural messaging to persevere doggedly and push oneself beyond the limits to achieve excellence. Read More
Listen in: What Makes an Apple? July 05, 2022 In the last years of his life, the writer Amos Oz talked regularly with Shira Hadad, who worked closely with him as the editor of his final novel, Judas. These candid, uninhibited dialogues show a side of Oz that few ever saw. Read More
