For the reader whose misfortune it is not to have yet discovered Kelly Cherry’s poems , this is your lucky day. Cherry’s new book offers a generous sampling of the poet’s work, culled from six previous volumes.
Books
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Twenty Centuries of Conversation
A review of Charles Taylor’s “A Secular Age”
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Getting Personal
Alice Munro is at the height of her powers as a short story writer in this collection, navigating with extraordinary agility the border between memoir and fiction.
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Reading in the Season of Lent
One could do worse than devote some time during Lent to ‘lectio divina’ and reading the Scriptures prayerfully.
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From These Ashes
Postapocalyptic novels were once popular back in the last millennium when we all worried about the Bomb and what it might do to us.
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Philip Roth’s Complaint
Roth’s language is mostly matter-of-fact, but often enough he launches into eloquent spasms of what the Germans call erlebte Rede (lived discourse), where writer and character breathe as one.
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(Re)Making History
In his 90th year, the indefatigable historian John Hope Franklin has written his life story. More than any other scholar, Franklin has made African-American history an essential part of American history.
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The Political Is Personal
Always try to do too much must be taken as one of Salman Rushdie’s mantras and he certainly lives up to it here This sprawling story flashes back and forth from pre-World War II Strasbourg to present-day Los Angeles touchesat least fleetinglyon every major world crisis from the Holocaust to
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In Widow’s Weeds
Joan Didion has been writing books for more than 40 years. Her newest and most unforgettable book is “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
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Tested by Fire
J Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist whose brilliant blue eyes came to express such engulfing sadness, brought a new kind of fire into the world and was burned by it. Like Hesiod’s Prometheus, Oppenheimer fought on the side of humankind, giving us the tools and weapons to determine our own fate; and fate punished him for it.