From the murky circumstances of her birth in Geneva in 1877 to her dramatic death in a flash flood in Ain Sefra, Algeria, Isabelle Eberhardt lived an unconventional life. At twenty, she unshackled herself from the “fetters” of modern... Read More

Imagine the journalist’s life: immersed in experience, on intimate terms with one’s subject, embarked on multiple and continuous journeys of discovery, and then asked to explain it all to a distractible audience. This is Lawrence... Read More

Once upon a time, vampires were not the sole literary domain of Twilight. As *First Blood: Birth of the Vampire—*an anthology of classic vampire literature—demonstrates, vampires have been ensnaring imaginations for centuries, and... Read More

Literary Capital: A Washington Reader is a collection of narratives by residents of and visitors to Washington, DC. In other words, a real grab bag. Reach in and pull out goodies from Dickens, Emerson, and Melville, or put them back and... Read More

Literature is one of the few places left for savoring the gifts of maturity; in this vein, the musings and conclusions of Edward Hoagland, long-time essayist, must not be missed. Hoagland has traveled widely—the essays in this book... Read More

Novelist, playwright, and non-fiction author Caryl Phillips has been the “other” in several cultures: in 1950s Britain after his family migrated from St. Kitts; in the US, where he spends part of the year on the faculty of Yale... Read More

To be human means striving to come to terms with impermanence, change, and loss. Rationally, one knows that nothing lasts forever, including youth or a perfect moment. But when the hard, cold, unavoidable reality of dissonance destroys... Read More

A title like "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition" sets expectations of broad strokes: one imagines an encyclopedic knowledge of humanity. To his immense credit, Dyer delivers such breadth in a series of analyses of cultural... Read More