Francis Spufford's welcome first volume of collected essays gathers an array of his compelling writings from the 1990s to the present. He makes use of a variety of encounters with particular places, writers, or books to address deeper questions relat...

Since World War II, the story of the trauma hero – the noble white man psychologically wounded by his encounter with violence – has become omnipresent in America's narratives of war, an imaginary solution to the contradictions of American political h...

The ruler of a totalitarian state seeks validation from a former schoolmate, now the nation's foremost thinker, in order to access a cultural cache alien to his regime. A literary critic provides commentary on an unfinished poem that both foretells...

"Tripping Over Clouds" issues a bold challenge to Ezra Pound's maxim to 'go in fear of abstractions'. Underpinning this is a re-imagining of abstraction as a prior state of possibility from which the world and ourselves are constantly re-emerging – a...

In "The Iliad "Homer sang of death and glory, of a few days in the struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans. Mortal men played out their fate under the gaze of the gods. "The Odyssey" is the original collection of tall traveller's tales. Odysseus,...

The three works of poetry that constitute "Tribunal" were written in the current context of seemingly ubiquitous warfare and the specter of unabashed neo-fascism, ethno-nationalism, and – especially in the United States – reassertions of white suprem...

From the 1920s through the 1950s, Bertolt Brecht wrote a number of short, fictionalized comments on contemporary life, politics, and thought. Through the dramatic events of the first half of the twentieth century, Brecht's Mr. Keuner offered up aphor...

Nina Bogin's Thousandfold is a journey through seasons and landscapes, a journal of ordinary life punctuated by extraordinary people and moments – the births of grandchildren, the physical decline of a husband, relationships with family and friends....

Not for sale in Estonia! Honore de Balzac's "Treatise on Modern Stimulants" is a meditation on five stimulants – tea, sugar, coffee, alcohol and tobacco – by an author very conscious of the fact that his gargantuan output of work was driven by an e...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... Set in London and Paris, "A Tale of Two Cities" paints a story of economic and political unrest at the time of the French Revolution. It remains one of Dicken's most popular books.