Emily Dickinson

The book "One Million" by New Yorker editor Hendrik Hertzberg is dotty. It's got thousands of dots -- tens of thousands, 5,000 dots per page for 200 pages. For the math-impaired, yes, that's exactly a million. The dots aren't doing......

Nothing quite haunts some of today’s composers like the disturbing story of Béla Bartók’s last five years. In 1940 he fled Nazi-influenced Budapest and moved to New York, where he lived in illness, obscurity and poverty. Young children threw...

Dozens of Mark Twain's letters and writings, from his early days in San Francisco until the end of his life, form the centerpiece of an auction taking place Thursday at Sotheby's in New York. An autographed manuscript of his "A......

The website M + E -- run by author Emma Straub and her husband, Michael Fusco -- is selling a new series of four literary posters, each with an illustration of a writer's home (with address). The illustrations by Aislinn......

The Wilderness Warrior Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America Douglas Brinkley Harper: 960 pp., $34.99 Reviewing several Roosevelt biographies in 1920, H.L. Mencken reported that he had found more "gush" than "sense." Douglas Brinkley's...

Daunting as it may be to assemble a centuries-spanning assessment of any country, even one with a fairly linear march through history, how does one approach a culture as unstable, contradictory and contested as ours? Where do you start? Where do you stop?...

When I was in my early 20s, living in Berkeley and drifting toward a PhD in Russian literature, I started writing poetry. It was a completely unexpected development. I definitely hadn't been one of those kids in high school who worked for the literary...

The phone rang. It was 6 a.m. "Yes," I said, groggy. It was the president. "Enough filibustering!" he shouted. "OK, but ..." "Up and at 'em!" he shouted. "All right, fine!" On the other end, I heard a dog bark, presumably Bo, the Portuguese...

The substantial $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize will be awarded to Virginia-based poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, who was born in 1920. Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine, cited the strong reserve in Taylor’s poems and praised their "sober and clear-...

The men opened the hive and bees swirled up into the sky like sparks from a fire. Bees flew through the weedy yard and past the chain-link fence. They flew into the alley, where a woman braced herself against the hood of a police car. Bees flew toward...

I'm impatient by nature. But I thought I had learned how to remain still in yoga classes, coaxing calm and patience from an overactive mind. I thought I learned patience when my daughter was born 2 1/2 weeks late. But I didn't really learn anything...

A Jury of Her Peers American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx Elaine Showalter Alfred A. Knopf: 608 pp., $30 The title of this, the "first literary history of American women writers ever written," explains Elaine Showalter, comes...