Literature

Professor and theologian Denys Turner discusses Dante's 'Divine Comedy' as a cohesive poetic and theological text.

David Jones’ 'In Parenthesis' is "the greatest work of modernist poetry you’ve never read."

Anne Carson’s newest collection of essays and poems probes the relationship between art and suffering.

Against the quotidian, the ecstatic will always find a way out: whether through music or madness, divinity or drugs.

Remembering the comic force and electric prose of the late Martin Amis, a true writer’s writer.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel, ‘Kairos,’ depicts a love affair haunted by history, preoccupied with the passage of time.

Andrea Wulf’s new book offers meditations on freedom, as told by a company of scholars that includes Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel.

Are Putin’s puppets orchestrating a sales campaign to promote George Orwell’s ‘1984’?

An extraordinary new study of ‘The Waste Land’ offers—with intensity and good humor—a comprehensive reading of Eliot’s greatest masterpiece.

In Ada Calhoun’s ‘Also a Poet,’ writing a biography of Frank O’Hara is really a way of writing an autobiography of Calhoun’s relationship with her father.

Roosevelt Montás is one of the growing number of people of color who testify to the value of classics and great books in their communities.

T. S. Eliot understood that we are mostly made of the past, and that to nullify it in the name of progress is to annihilate much that is precious.

If the first Mass at the Last Supper welcomed a mix of allegiance and desertion, the here-and-now Church cannot do otherwise.

George R. Stewart’s ‘Storm’ is a testament to the power of nature, and the power of human ingenuity to address its consequences.

Elizabeth Hardwick believed style and morality were inextricably linked.

Not all aesthetic consumption is equal, and developing the ability to judge the art we encounter can help transform us.

Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel, ‘Peaces,’ is a work of imaginative exuberance, at once absurd and moving.

The works of Greg Gerke and Rachel Eisendrath remind us why we come to art: to be changed, to find beauty, and to interpret our own lives.

“Every time I read Donoghue, I knew I was reading the work of a master.”

Through his renowned Latin classes, Fr. Reginald Foster taught students new ways to understand time and connect with others.

Why a “dead” language lives on

A new book explores how to build a “theological resistance” when political resistance is futile.

What does freedom look like in a pandemic year?

Often, we ask ourselves not just who we are, but who we might have been. Fiction can help us explore answers to that question.

Set in a miserable dystopia, Houellebecq’s latest novel is both thought-provoking and wearying, fronted by a hypercynical yet dangerously nostalgic narrator.