As with many of Auden’s longer poems, 'For the Time Being' is a slippery beast. Whenever you think you’ve got a hold of it, it goes off in another direction.
Did Wallace Stevens convert to Roman Catholicism as he lay dying in the summer of 1955? This question has provoked more controversy than one might expect.
The books I’m recommending here I more or less bumped into by accident, usually when some reviewer or author of a memoir took the trouble to cite something good.
Tempted as I am to recommend those I give as presents year after year, I’ll offer instead some very recent books that have already earned a home on our bookshelf.
No one says growing up is easy, and four novels I’ve read this year reiterate just how challenging the journey from youth (or youthfulness) to maturity can be.
Alice McDermott's latest novel is a compelling accounting of a life that begins in Depression-era Brooklyn and winds its way to the late-twentieth-century suburbs.
It is a mark of Antonin Scalia's pioneering influence that originalism and fidelity to text have become a staple of the Supreme Court’s interpretive methodology.
The author of the Fintan Dunne novels and "Banished Children of Eve" talks about the importance of cities, Catholic novelists, and the hard work of writing.
As Andrew Bacevich sees it, Americans have mutated into passive spectators, not active citizens, across a wide spectrum of once-sacred civic responsibilities.
"For Discrimination" offers the bravest and most honest defense of affirmative action in a long time (maybe ever), and for that we are in Randall Kennedy’s debt.
Four decades after Franco’s death, relics of the past are finding their way into Spain's museums, where they can be both preserved and politically neutralized.
In 'Waiting for the Barbarians,' Mendelsohn has collected essays originally published in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and elsewhere.
In this brilliantly argued intellectual history, David Nirenberg asks how influential figures in the Western tradition have thought about Judaism over the millennia.
The first thing to note about Andrew Koppelman’s new book is is that word “American”—sitting awkwardly beside the abstract concept of “religious neutrality."
The issues that gnaw at George Scialabba relate primarily to political economy. For an avowed man of the left, “the last three decades have been bitter medicine.”
