Terrence Rafferty: Elmore Leonard’s West is “an idea of the West”
The novels and poetry of Albert Murray: “He is beyond category”
New biography of Madeleine L’Engle by her granddaughters is a “journey of becoming”
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the “iconic piece of literature” that changed the way we think of the world
Michelle Dean’s Sharp celebrates ten women writers who did it their way
J. Michael Lennon: Norman Mailer “recognized the permanent cleft in the American character”
Sportswriter Alexander Wolff: “Basketball becomes a way of working through things”
Science fiction authority presents a Universe-expanding exhibition in New York City
Brooks D. Simpson: Faithfulness to the historical record places race at the center of Reconstruction
Cultural panic and overwhelming change: Richard White looks back on America’s first Gilded Age
The Escape, first published play by an African American, leaps to the New York City stage
Jefferson’s Daughters: Catherine Kerrison measures the chasm between the rhetoric and reality of revolution
Wendell Berry on the “talkers and storytellers” of Port William, Kentucky
Mark Ford: Echoes and experimentation in John Ashbery’s “most expansive decade”
Wai Chee Dimock: Reading American literature outside the box
Pulitzer winner Caroline Fraser on the “deep and unresolved tensions” in the Little House books
