W.H. Auden

Tad Friend's "Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor" is a memoir of growing up in the once unassailable American ruling class -- and of a long personal struggle to shed some of the emotional baggage such a lineage conferred....

The concluding volume in the magisterial historical tetralogy Richard Rhodes calls "The Making of the Nuclear Age" bears a weighty subtitle that hints at its somewhat discursive nature. "The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and...

THE tale of a superhero, a '70s drug dealer, or a plot to destroy the world it's not. Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," which isn't really about a bear and does not feature a mountain, is the story of an elderly couple — a once-...

For most people, spending time with a violent, Tabasco-guzzling Oregon anarchist, a teenage member of the Aryan Brotherhood, opera-loving lawyers whose dog fatally mauled an innocent woman and an eternally wired, drugged-out Hollywood agent would not be...

World's End Pablo Neruda Translated from the Spanish by William O'Daly Copper Canyon Press: 96 pp., $15 paper "World's End," originally published in Spanish in 1969, toward the end of the career of the great poet Pablo Neruda (he died in 1973, soon...

By Richard Rayner Off the southwest coast of Finland are more than 80,000 small islands left by the retreating ice 10,000 years ago. Some of the islands are mere rocks, washed by the cool waters of the Baltic, but many are covered in pine and fir trees...

The poet Weldon Kees was born in Beatrice, Neb., in 1914, though what's best known about him is that on July 18, 1955, his car was found abandoned with the keys still in the ignition in a parking lot on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge....

Playing With the Grown-Ups A Novel Sophie Dahl Doubleday/Nan A. Talese: 272 pp., $24 "She does have children, you know," Kitty's magisterial grandfather would tell potential suitors who called looking for Kitty's beautiful mother, Marina. Kitty grew...

Edward Anderson had a strange and sad career. He was born in Texas in 1905 and grew up in Oklahoma, serving his apprenticeship as a journalist on a small paper in Ardmore, Okla. Restless, he worked as a deckhand on a freighter, plied his fists as a...

In my neighborhood in San Francisco, the economic recession gets told more by what you don't see than what you do see. There are fewer parking spaces on the street at night because fewer people are going out. There are no foreclosure notices attached to...

"City of indulgence" is the way poet W.H. Auden once described Macau, the former Portuguese colony returned to Chinese control seven years ago. Once famous for gambling dens, international intrigue, racy nightlife and a laissez-faire bent, the small...

In today's guest post, our Shallow Thought Wednesday guru, John Lindner, examines a not-so-shallow question concerning the complexities of love, and quotes my favorite poet to boot. At least I think he's my favorite poet. EL......