If you had asked ten-year-old me about my favorite author, I would have replied unhesitatingly that it was J.R.R. Tolkien. The experience of reading The Lord of the Rings had been…

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From All Things Are Too Small, which will be published next month by Metropolitan Books. “All things / are too small,” begins a poem believed to be written by the thirteenth-century Dutch…

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From Trondheim, which was published last month by Bellevue Literary Press. On the day their son was going to die, Lil had given herself the task of carrying forty-plus sacks…

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There used to be the notion that Keats was killed by a bad review, that in despair and hopelessness he turned his back to the wall and gave up the…

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We shall not understand what a book is, and why a book has the value many persons have, and is even less replaceable than a person, if we forget how…

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The year 2017 was, I presume, an awkward, anxious moment to be named poet laureate of the United States. What the writer owes the collective and where she fits within…

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My first and still most vivid memory of a Woody Allen movie is of the scene in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)…

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The surprising legacy of a ninety-year-old peace pact

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When you consider the savagery of your run-of-the-mill fairy tale, our use of the term to connote “romance” or “idealization” smacks of nothing more than romance and idealization — a…

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