In the Current Issue
The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet
By Rowan Ricardo Phillips
On ‘Frankenstein,’ A Monster of a Book
By Hernan DiazIn 1818, it probably would have been more shocking to have a novel about a Victoria Frankenstein doing perfectly normal, boring science than one about Victor making a hodgepodge of body parts come to life. In more than one way, Victor Frankenstein …
The Daily
Arts & Culture
Smalltown Lift
By Brian BlanchfieldOne last stop, he says. And they drive to Westside Lanes. / I grew up bowling. I don’t want to bowl. It was raining. / We’re not going to bowl, the circus carpet dark with gum / beneath them, and he parts the curtains on the best
From the Archive, Issue 195
Poetry
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America’s First Female Mapmaker
By Ted WidmerA recent item for sale in the rare-book trade caught my eye. Boston Rare Maps had a series of twelve maps created by America’s first female mapmaker, Emma Willard. They were to accompany a textbook she had written, first issued in 1828. The maps …
The Daily
Weird Book Room
Voices from Chernobyl
By Svetlana AlexievichOn April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58 a. m., a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technical disaster of the twentieth century. . . . For tiny Belarus (population: ten million), it was a national disaster. . . . Today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom seven hundred thousand are children. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birthrates by twenty percent.
From the Archive, Issue 172
Letters & Essays
Welcome Home
By Everette MaddoxI understand: / for years, perhaps, you have lived / underground. Handling only / darkness, you have not become / accustomed to it. You want to get out.
From the Archive, Issue 58
Poetry
Further Adventures
By John Ashbery and James Schuyler“It’s hard to believe it wasn’t built to look that way,” Alice said, turning her back on the Forum. “Listen, Marshall, I want you to write to them about that furnace. I refuse to spend another winter like the last one.”
