When Anna Catherine Bahlmann was twenty-four years old, a young girl named Edith Jones became her newest student. Bahlmann constantly had to add more folklore and poetry to the German curriculum to satisfy Jones’ ever-expanding curiosity. Sensing the girl’s potential, Bahlmann carefully preserved the early letters exchanged between the two
John Donatich— This year I loved reading books that couldn’t help but get tangled in the web of presidential politics. Mickey Edwards was both prophetic and prescriptive in The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans, carefully reviewing the symptoms of a political system effectively
Ivan Lett— Rare is the book campaign that immensely satisfies both personally and professionally. As work began for The Richard Burton Diaries, edited by Chris Williams, there was a typical shape to the assumptions for such a book coming from Yale University Press: “Oh great, the diaries of the Victorian
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita has become a literary classic, read over and over by those who cannot pull themselves away from Humbert Humbert’s troubling yet tragically beautiful prose. In John Sutherland’s Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, he traces beloved authors like Nabokov back through when
Emily Bernard starts her biography, “This book is a portrait of a once controversial figure, Carl Van Vechten, a white man with a passion for blackness.” And while today more people can recognize Carl Van Vechten as a patron and leader of the black arts and Harlem Renaissance movement, in
While John Keats may often be remembered today as the quintessentially tragic Romantic figure, Nicholas Roe explains in his recent biography, John Keats: A New Life, that the reality of the celebrated poet’s character was far more complex. Keats’s life was dogged by insecurities, sexual frustration and drug use, and
Michael Slater, author of The Great Charles Dickens Scandal is not the only one preoccupied with the secret affairs of Charles Dickens. In his sweeping guide Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, John Sutherland introduces and explores 294 of literature’s greatest artists, providing biographical details
August Strindberg was not only a novelist, satirist, poet, photographer, painter, alchemist, and hellraiser but also, as Arthur Miller suggested, “the mad inventor of modern theater” who led playwriting out of the polite drawing room into the snakepit of psychological warfare. Best known for his play Miss Julie, Strindberg was
Listen to the podcast interview for Jews and Words on iTunes! Somewhere between the What is Jewish Culture? event at the 92Y launching the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization and the NPR Weekend Edition interview with Scott Simon, we managed to catch Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger to
Charles Dickens is perhaps the most beloved figure of British literary heritage. His writing has become a revered aspect of Great Britain’s national identity, one entrenched with the warm Victorian traditions of family, hearth and home. Michael Slater, in his new biography, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal connects Dickens’ celebrity with