April Bernard

Crossroads

Sithens in a Net

Haunt

a poem

Virgil Revisited

David Ferry’s marvelous new translation of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’

Eloise: The Feral Star

Eloise, the children’s literature star—she of the Plaza, Paris, and Moscow—is experiencing something of a revival.

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

Cold Morning

a poem

Jorie Graham’s Magic

Beyond Pippi Longstocking

Though best known for having created the red-headed and wildly independent little girl Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren wrote many books not involving Pippi. Newly reissued, Seacrow Island may be among her greatest works.

Laura’s World

Nostalgia, with its admixture of warmth, loss, and dangerous sentimentality, suffuses any consideration of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. It’s the only way to make sense of the phenomenal popularity of the new scholarly tome, Pioneer Girl.

Beatrix Potter’s Darkness

As with many classics, if Beatrix Potter’s tales have become invisibly “charming,” it is time to return to them and see them anew.

Lisbon, 1989

a poem

‘In the Face of Our Ghastly Sexual Culture’

Caged Laughter

Is it possible to feel more ambivalent than I do about Orange Is the New Black?

Margaret Drabble: In Defiance of Time

A writer whose puzzles start with the frame

Heroines in the Garden

Andrea Barrett’s ‘Archangel’ and Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘The Signature of All Things’

A Poet Who Dares

Plath: Rage and Laughter

If we consider embarrassment as an aesthetic strategy rather than as a mistake, we begin to see how funny Sylvia Plath often is.

What I Hate About Writers’ Houses

Here's What I Hate About Writers' Houses

On the subject of Writers’ Houses, that dark genius Robert Frost would have understood the paradox I find myself inhabiting: that I hate them in general, but soften to something like affection in the face of particular places. Frost enjoyed mocking his own, and others’, ambivalences, especially when personal feeling interfered with principle. Whether or not he also would have enjoyed hearing my footsteps in his old parlor and study is another matter; I would guess not.