The Making of a Children’s Writer
June 28, 2021
John Batchelor— Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, the son of a highly skilled artist and sculptor, John Lockwood Kipling, and his wife Alice (nee Macdonald), who was… READ MORE
Category: Literature
Ibsen’s Kingdom
June 17, 2021
Evert Sprinchorn— For people with intellects, reading Ibsen was more than entertaining; it was enthralling. Reading his plays is equivalent to a journey through nineteenth-century thought, its art, politics, and… READ MORE
Samuel Johnson on Endings
May 21, 2021
This year Yale University Press published Samuel Johnson, a diverse and accessible selected works of eighteenth-century Britain’s preeminent man of letters. The following excerpt is a section from one of… READ MORE
A Tribute to Theodore Margellos
May 14, 2021
John Donatich— The recent passing of Theodore Margellos sent me to my bookshelf to look at the Margellos World Republic of Letters volumes lined up side by side. Together, they… READ MORE
From Dante to Disney
April 12, 2021
José María Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee— A few days ago, a subsecretary in the newly-installed Italian government led by Mario Draghi tweeted out to followers an inspiring message which… READ MORE
A Conversation with Marilyn Booth
March 26, 2021
This month, Yale University Press published Voices of the Lost by Hoda Barakat, a chilling novel that weaves together a series of devastating confessions about life in contemporary Arab society. Set… READ MORE
A Poem for Spring
March 25, 2021
Spring officially arrived this past weekend, bringing with it the reminder that roughly one year has passed since the United States first entered lockdown. Maya C. Popa’s poem, “Spring,” recalls… READ MORE
The Orphanage
March 19, 2021
Last month, Yale University Press published The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, translated from the Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler. Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling… READ MORE
George Eliot vs. Shakespeare’s Empathetic Imagination
March 18, 2021
Paula Marantz Cohen— Before I ever read Shakespeare, I read George Eliot. I was inspired to study Victorian literature by George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch. I love all Eliot’s work, and I especially… READ MORE
Police Before “The Police”
March 16, 2021
Sal Nicolazzo— In his Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue, and Arms—the precursor to The Wealth of Nations—Adam Smith defines “the objects of police” as “the cheapness of commodities, public security and… READ MORE