The debates over religion and religious freedom are almost as American as flying the stars and stripes, fireworks on July 4th, and Friday night football games. In Endowed by Our Creator: The Birth of Religious Freedom in America, Michael I. Meyerson explores the debate between religious freedom and religious idealism,
A sensitive discussion will ensue for anyone who names Carl Van Vechten a “father” of the Harlem Renaissance. Although married to Russian actress Fania Marinoff, Van Vechten never had children. Nevertheless, he was a patron and active supporter of many young artists and writers, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston,
“Je est un autre,” “I is someone else,” is one of Bob Dylan’s maxims. With 34 studio albums, over 500 songs, and a career that spans fifty years Bob Dylan’s voice is one recognizable to generations. Generations that each have their own memories of a different Dylan, a Dylan that
Margaret Sayers Peden, translator of Fernando de Rojas’ fifteenth-century classic La Celestina, among dozens of other books, considers here the joys and pleasures, challenges and frustrations of literary translation. Often regarded as the first European novel and second only to Don Quixote in its importance to Spanish literature, Celestina is
In honor of National Dairy Month in June, we thought you might like a taste of Deborah Valenze’s Milk: A Local and Global History, covering the illuminating cultural history of milk, from ancient myth to modern grocery store, now available in paperback from Yale University Press. Deborah Valenze— Cows that
Both before it was built and since, people have been boosting and bashing Boston’s Prudential Center, whose construction began in earnest fifty years ago. Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape, by architectural historian Elihu Rubin and published today by Yale University Press, captures and explains what the
One of the joys and challenges of literary biography is deciding how to interpret the ripples that are made as each new nugget of information drops into that heady mixture of facts and figures, vibrant anecdotes and dynamic interpretations that make up what we call an author’s “life and work.”
Earlier this year, Marc Michael Epstein, author of The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination, gave a lecture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, called “Bad Boy: Portrait of the Rylands Haggadah as Naughty Sibling.” In the text and video below, he explains the significance and pleasures of working
Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-1781) is a classic work of literary biography, covering 52 poets whom the author felt had the most influence on the English language. Now, John Sutherland follows in this great tradition with his sweeping and ambitious book, Lives of the Novelists:
Defining a Change: Literary Theory, Truth, and Fiction in the Digital Age
Terry Eagleton’s newest book The Event of Literature addresses literary theory and tackles the question—what is literature—utilizing a variety of theories. Each theory has its own historical perspective that is formed by morals, values, and events. It is this ever-changing standard used to define literature that Eagleton grapples with in
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