American authors Archives

American authors

Nancy Lemann

Host Christopher Beha,Guest Nancy Lemann

There and back: the author of Lives of the Saints discusses her career, religion, and influences

End Rhymes

From “A Conversation About Trees,” which appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of The Sewanee Review. I set out here to construct an argument about “nature poetry,” in order eventually…

The Portrait Gallery

by Ann Patchett,

What the American Academy of Arts and Letters taught me about death

The Possessed

by Joshua Cohen,

Philip Roth reviews his own biographer

Ionic Pixie Dreamboy

by Kurt Vonnegut,

From passages of letters included in Love, Kurt, a collection of messages written between 1941 and 1945 by Vonnegut to his girlfriend Jane, whom he married in 1945, which was…

Anecdote of the Bar

by Robert Frost,

From a letter written by Robert Frost to Wallace Stevens in July 1935, included in The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3, edited by Mark Richardson et al., which will…

Whisperings

by David Means,

A writer alone with the work

Exit Ghost

by Benjamin Taylor,

From a remembrance delivered last May at a memorial service for Philip Roth. Taylor is a professor of writing at the New School. His most recent book, The Hue and…

Literary notes

by Laurence Hutton,