Door bells,” Barbara Guest said, divorcing the compound with a pause. The poem was simple, startling, one minute long. In the ...

Just writing what happens, and knowing a lot of it won’t work and that what works will work not because of technique, mainly, ...

The United States is a lyric nation. It has a geography suited to epic, and an expanse suited to epic, but it is organized in ...

For the nonhunter, like myself, the snake hunt is more pageant than sport. Eastern timber rattlesnakes—distant, misunderstood ...

The cemetery had been in existence since 1890, and back then it had large monuments, sumptuous mausoleums, the kind that were ...

From Barbara Pym’s novel The Sweet Dove Died, originally published in 1978 (NYRB Classics): ‘We specialize in porcelain and ...

Vinca is a complex little plant, and periwinkle, named for its blossoms, is an equally complex color. A subset of violet, which is a subset of purple, periwinkle denotes a precise shade that appears ...

October 16, 2023 – On finding a version of heaven—or, perhaps, life—in Red Dead Redemption 2.

An encounter with Emerson’s essays. This past October, I found myself in the store looking at a 1990 Vintage Books edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not having read much Emerson before, even as ...

October 1, 2020 – Daniel Mendelsohn on Homer, W. G. Sebald, and the looping, digressive narrative style known as ring composition.

April 16, 2021 – To honor the author of ‘Moby-Dick,’ Valerie Stivers chases her own white whale: the perfect chowder.

March 17, 2025 – “Reading Frost requires a kind of modesty and curiosity. Coming to this modesty has been a big part of my own experience with him. At first, I was reading a lot of the poems and ...