The new century -- no longer new -- has been insatiably consuming good writers. In the early years of the twenty-first we endured a rough patch. In a five-year span we lost Anthony Powell, Edgar Bowers, William Maxwell, W.G. Sebald, R.S. Th…
Welcome news is so rare in our withered literary culture, we are obligated to celebrate good new work when we encounter it. The summer 2026 issue of New Verse Review has been published, and it includes work by several of our finest establis…
The Night of the Murdered Poets took place on August 12, 1952. Thirteen literary and intellectual figures were murdered on Stalin’s orders in the basement of Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Four were poets who wrote in Yiddish – Perets Markish,
Yet another unfamiliar word I would like to see revived: gasconade. Dr. Johnson gives a typically terse definition: “a boast; a bravado.” He cites the letter Jonathan Swift wrote to Alexander Pope in which I encountered the word this week:
The only summer mornings we woke up and got dressed early was garbage collection day. We had to beat the trash men. This was long before recycling came into fashion. Everything went into the fluted metal trash cans. Larger objects were pile…
“[T]here is, perhaps, a special pleasure in re-learning the names of many of the flowers every spring. It is like re-reading a book that one has almost forgotten. Montaigne tells us that he had so bad a memory that he could always read an o…
Literature is a hobby, and not. It is an academic discipline, and not. It is a diversion, a distraction, an escape. But some of us can’t imagine a well-lived life without it. There’s a lot of talk about books being good for us, making us be…
The medical technician performing the echocardiogram asked me to lie on my side, not “dorsally.” I thought first of the triangular fin on the back of a porpoise. Then I thought of Nabokov’s 1966 interview with Alfred J. Appel, who asks, “Do…
“It is only about the contents of a book that I care, not its shape, its date, or the number on its flyleaves.” Spoken like a reader, not a parvenu accumulating vogueish titles as though they were bowling trophies. Books as fashion statemen…
On the morning of August 5, 1763, Dr. Johnson accompanied Boswell on the stage-coach that would carry him to the port of Harwich. Then twenty-two, Boswell would be taking the packet-boat to Utrecht in the Netherlands, where he would study l…
“Some day I shall compile an Oxford Book of Depressing Verse, which shall contain nothing but the most magnificent expressions of melancholy and despair.” I’ve never spent much time reading Aldous Huxley – Brave New World in junior-high sch…
What has disappeared? Ambrose Bierce, Weldon Kees, Jimmy Hoffa. Aristotle’s second book of Politics, three-decker novels, rhupunts. Typewriters, payphones, civility. In his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940; trans. James E. Irby, 196…