I wrote a forty-to-fifty-page treatment, which no one ever saw, of how the opera would unfold. And then I got that down to fifteen pages, which the composer saw, and then ten pages, which the ...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Sharon Olds discusses sex, religion, and writing poems that “women were definitely not supposed to write,” in an excerpt from her Art of Poetry interview with Jessica ...

Have all been fought and won. In a very short time, now. This war will be done. So I order my men. Children, actually, and far from home. To fight and die for nothing. We don't want no more of your ...

Have you seen this video of a three-year-old weeping over Justin Bieber? It became an Internet phenomenon, culminating in Jimmy Kimmel flying the toddler to his show so she could sit on Bieber’s lap.

the castigations and the bountiful.

below and above them with pink.

Sometimes the recognition of self and other is uncanny, even disturbing. In 1903, a criminal named Will West arrived at ...

I didn’t know Amish romance novels existed until a trip I took a number of years ago to Shipshewana, Indiana. There my uncle directed an Amish and Mennonite cultural center, and I was ostensibly ...

Plato’s Phaedrus begins at the edge of the city of Athens, in the countryside, as we would say today. Enter Socrates and Phaedrus, his younger friend. Phaedrus has just come from the house of Lysias, ...

While I write this, my husband is cycling through the rain, taking our one-year-old son, who last night yet again wouldn’t sleep, to nursery school, and I am thinking of Tove Ditlevsen’s poems. I, too ...