You might expect that there’d be a little bit of Beowulf in a book by a medieval studies scholar in York, England. Fiona Mozley’s debut novel adds some Heathcliff, too, for a touch of Yorkshire Moors gothic. But even if you can spot the forbears in Elmet, you probably won’t suspect what you’re getting in […]
Scott Cairns is still carrying on his affair with Erato, the Greek muse he addresses throughout his poetry. “I wanted very much/ to find a word to grant us both assurance” he says in the poem “Erato at 64.” At such an age, lovers and poets know that the beloved is as much within them […]
Around a table at El Mag as the days grow short. A warm place in the early dark of December. I had a Burrito To Go— misnamed because I always eat it there. There are so few lights on the peninsula at night; much more darkness as raccoons meander across untraveled roads. Waves lap empty […]
It’s not that dancing on the stage of the Latino Cultural Center in Dallas the evening I arrived in the city wasn’t in the range of possibilities. Over the years, my friend Juan has introduced me to a lot of things I hadn’t previously considered. Like the time we put together a talent show in […]
De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s debut novel begins with an arresting scene. Pratt Shepherd is in the middle of a fight with his free-spirited girlfriend in a small, coastal North Carolina town on the eve of World War 2. However, Azalea ‘Knot’ Centre, a sometime teacher at the local school for African-American children, is nobody’s possession. When […]
Late in her brief but thought-provoking new book, historian Jill Lepore gets down to why she would write something titled This America: The Case for the Nation: “In American history, liberals have failed, time and again, to defeat illiberalism except by making appeals to national aims and ends…Writing national history creates plenty of problems. But […]
Even when I was a child in the 1960s and 70s there was still some adventurer’s romance attached to the words of Henry Stanley upon finding his quarry: Dr. Livingstone, I presume? Despite the flood of newly independent African nations in that era, people could still be heard referring to Africa as “the dark continent” […]
It wasn’t your typical megachurch experience. When journalist and Lutheran pastor Angela Denker showed up at New Destiny Christian Center to check out the ministry of Paula White, one of Donald Trump’s pastoral advisors, she might have expected a coffee shop in the lobby (she kinda did) and a glitzy auditorium for a sanctuary. Instead […]
Because you know there will be another one. And we will have the same choice we always have—to define the world in relation to the tweeter or… …to do something else. Recently I attended an experimental theatre production about the American healthcare system. We had to take off our shoes before going into the theatre. […]
How many piercings can a museum docent have? It was a question Christy Coleman didn’t know she’d have to struggle with when she became the CEO of the American Civil War Center in 2013. But when that museum merged with the Museum of the Confederacy and built a brand new facility around the old Tredegar […]
