September 10, 2026 – “Saad passed through a boarded up, overgrown town and thought, Who would live in this place?” ...

Across ten collections of poetry and prose, Dorothea Lasky has shown herself to be a writer of formidable range. One of her ...

September 9, 2026 – “But I did feel, as we worked on this one, that I was listening in on many voices whose speakers were ...

And that the first thing he found in Hell was the sublime face of Atlas, who, with the world on his shoulders, ...

I wondered briefly what fear was. Where on earth did it come from?

It started with what and went from there.

February 19, 2015 – André Breton’s poem “The Verb to Be” originally appeared in our Spring 1985 issue. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t ...

the earth has jilted the sun.

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 ...

My water journey began on the airplane, when I recognized a bottle of Elisabethen Quelle. I remembered this brand from my time at the Doemens water sommelier school in Gräfelfing. It’s a mainstream ...

When I began to research the history of crosswords for my recent book on the subject, I was sort of shocked to discover that they weren’t invented until 1913. The puzzle seemed so deeply ingrained in ...

This morning, before breakfast, I played nineteen games of Scrabble on my phone. I won thirteen. It took less than an hour. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve played Scrabble every day, ...