Bard of New Jersey
August Kleinzahler’s fourteenth collection of poems, Snow Approaching on the Hudson, begins with the death of Elvis and ends with a recollection of his teacher, the...
Gibbon & Ethiopia
To the Editors: In “The Glories of Aksum” [NYR, October 7], Peter Brown quotes Edward Gibbon’s dictum, in chapter 47 of the Decline and Fall of...
‘And I One of Them’
More written about than read, more notorious than known, the British heiress Nancy Cunard has much to tell us and warn us against. She was born...
Family Liturgies
There was “nothing for him” in England. “There were no ‘Homes for Heroes.’ Oh no. No ‘Homes for Heroes.’” My grandmother said this indignantly. And if...
Nazis on the Run
In the summer of 2020 a court in Hamburg found Bruno Dey, a ninety-three-year-old former member of the SS Totenkopfsturmbann (Death’s Head Battalion) and a guard...
Our Trojan Moment
The Women of Troy is the second novel in Pat Barker’s trilogy-in-progress about the Trojan War. Its predecessor, The Silence of the Girls (2018), was set...
Exile on Main Street
During his 2015 visit to the United States, Pope Francis told an audience of American bishops that the Catholic Church should seek to fuse the “epic...
Reimagining the Public Defender
In our national debates about criminal justice reform, public defenders have not received as much attention as police and prosecutors. Perhaps this is because their problems...
The Mind’s Body Problem
According to the major monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—humans have a special nature and destiny, different from and superior to those of other animals. Created by...
