Michael Ondaatje had been experimenting across forms for decades before the publication of “The English Patient,” teaching writers who had crossed borders to arrive in the West to spell out their own ...

The world exceeds us. It comes to us out of darkness. The cave is the universe, the nightly presence of that unknown...

Former tech reporters Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr are running The Best Bookstore in Union Square like a startup

A daring, genre-defying work of nonfiction from one of our greatest poets. Alice Oswald goes in search of poetry in its original, wildest form—before it was written down, before it belonged to a single voice—and finds it still speaking all around us. “I’m looking for the voice of poetry before it knows it is poetry, when it is still improvising itself out of human emergency and memory and the song of the seed-sower and the bone violin. . . . The word poetry is not wild enough to hold them all,” she writes. What begins as an attempt to “interview” Homer becomes a wide-ranging exploration of an anonymous tradition that exists beyond authorship, spanning a world of singers, storytellers, mourners, and listeners, of nightingales, grasshoppers, and rivers. Zigzagging through ballads, riddles, pibrochs, drama, interviews, artificial intelligence, and sonnets, Rhapsody is a restless, miraculous exploration of poetry in its most vital form, and a resounding manifesto for the oral tradition. At once intimate and expansive, Oswald invites us to listen to the voices that shape us, and to recognize poetry not as a solitary, written art, but as a communal, essential human inheritance.

From gold to water, California’s wealth was built on extraction. The AI boom is reviving an old question: who pays the price?

A haunting reimagining of Billy the Kid—myth, violence, and regret collide in a lyrical coming-of-age story woven with history, legend, and the omnipresence of birds. Daybreak Birdsong Always Wakes Hi...

New research found that fog is rife with so much life that it's comparable to an ocean to an entire ocean in density.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking is absurd—and damning.

Reveals how America is a nation founded on grievance. Grievance, in America, always concatenates with racism and evinces itself most violently in those moments when white supremacy, fallaciously, pres...

A moving poetic memoir about a family on the fringes of religion and society, this unforgettable story about a mother's destructive involvement with Christian fundamentalism pulls the curtain back on the darker side of American religious experience.Keith Waldrop's account of his mid-twentieth-century Midwestern upbringing opens a window on a uniquely American landscape of desolation and desire. Waldrop's mother, central to the book, was a devout Christian, consumed with the question of just what a Christian was. Divorced from his father—a railway man, a Mason, coming and going with the Santa Fe railroad, then gone—she moves from place to place and from sect to sect, suffering migraines and speaking in tongues, teaching piano, and sinking ever deeper into apocalyptic reveries about tribulations lying in store and the advent of Christ's return. Then there are Waldrop's siblings: his sister on the hunt for a husband, and his loud, lounging, scapegrace older brothers in search of the next dollar and a good time, cooking up scams and leaving a mess behind. As for Waldrop, the narrator of what he describes as a fictional memoir, he looks back at those days with a peculiar detachment of his own, compassionate, quietly humorous at times, in light of which the simple facts assume a stark, near hallucinatory clarity, while scenes of life spool by like a home movie to no sound. "Neither the joys of heaven nor hell's worst prospects," Waldrop writes, "provide as forceful a motive as the mere emptiness of the world."In Light While There Is Light, Waldrop writes in a tradition that extends back to Hawthorne, Poe, and Dreiser, as he reveals the fear, madness, and destruction lurking behind the makeshift and make-believe of American life.

Al Scarborough has sailed on. Stories, no doubt, will continue to be told. Some of them will even be mostly true…