In Praise of Good Bookstores September 07, 2023 Jeff Deutsch—the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the world—pays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions. Read More
Emily Hauser on How Women Became Poets August 24, 2023 Women, as Virginia Woolf recognized, need rooms of their own to write. So, too, have women writers throughout history needed a term to describe what it is they do. Read More
In dialogue: Women in translation August 16, 2023 In recent years, “Women in Translation” month has emerged as a critical platform for questioning the underrepresentation of women authors in translated literature and exploring the significance of bringing their works to a global audience. At its core lie the vital and pressing questions: Why aren’t more works by women being translated, and why are women in translation so important? Read More
Pleasure and Efficacy July 30, 2023 Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one’s sex. Read More
The vanishing lives of coral July 17, 2023 At least in the twenty-first-century popular imagination, coral alternately symbolizes either a blissful day at the beach or the end of our planet as we know it. In the nineteenth century, however, coral had many other lives. Read More
In dialogue: How does poetry help? April 30, 2023 Across the world, poems have existed for millennia, asking questions and telling stories that affirm, interrogate, celebrate, or simply sit with the mysteries of human life. As more and more of our lives become carved away by forces of consumerism, these mysteries may become buried deeper still, perhaps prompting us to wonder, how does poetry help? Read More
Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die April 30, 2023 Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die explores tactility, sound, sensuality, and intimacy. Set across the four seasons of a year, these fresh and original poems by Tawanda Mulalu combine an inviting confessional voice and offbeat imagery, and offer an appealing mixture of seriousness and humor. Read More
To a slower life April 26, 2023 I live less than a mile from Walden Pond. There, in the woods on the east side of the pond, Thoreau built his small cabin and wrote his great book. It is probably true that Thoreau left his cabin from time to time to walk into the town of Concord, one mile away, to see his family and others. Read More
Listen in: The Owl and the Nightingale April 15, 2023 The Owl and the Nightingale, one of the earliest literary works in Middle English, is a lively, anonymous comic poem about two birds who embark on a war of words in a wood, with a nearby poet reporting their argument in rhyming couplets, line by line and blow by blow. Read More
Honoring fairy tales April 14, 2023 Fairy tales are not medicine for the sick world in which we live, they are indications and traces of what we were and can become. Read More
Listen in: Three Roads Back April 11, 2023 In Three Roads Back, Robert Richardson, the author of magisterial biographies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James, tells the connected stories of how these foundational American writers and thinkers dealt with personal tragedies early in their careers. Read More
Gods and Mortals March 28, 2023 Gripping tales that abound with fantastic characters and astonishing twists and turns, Greek myths confront what it means to be mortal in a world of powerful forces beyond human control. Read More
In dialogue: Writing women’s history March 27, 2023 We asked four of our authors the following question: What do we find when we read ‘women’ into histories that often exclude them? Read More
Listen in: The Forest March 25, 2023 Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the early United States, The Forest imagines how a wide variety of Americans experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, and featuring both real and invented characters, the book follows painters, poets, enslaved people, farmers, and artisans living and working in a world still made largely of wood. Read More
Paul Laurence Dunbar March 22, 2023 A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. Read More
