Arts & Culture
Bone chapels and their strange art
In catacombs, crypts, and ossuaries, I’ve seen the ugliness of death transformed into something beautiful.
A poet’s quarrel with herself
Danielle Chapman’s lustrous memoir is at its best when she holds her family’s Confederate history up to the light.
For love of Dante
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell writes, in 39 poems, a charmingly backhanded love letter to the Italian poet.
Clarissa and her flowers
Reading The Hours in my husband’s hospital room, I was stunned by the novel’s incarnational imagery.
Piercing the veil
Zach Williams’s stories of everyday life are propelled by strange turns of events, like a dad discovering his son’s sixth toe in the bath.
Does Nathan Hill wink at us in Wellness?
Why are non-White characters so absent from this urban/suburban narrative?
Cultivating literary Dallas
“It was not enough to publish books,” says Deep Vellum founder Will Evans. “We needed a place to invite people in, to put literature at the core of the cultural community.”
The heart of the humanities
In a culture that too often values people simply for their labor, learning for learning’s sake is its own good.
Gods who make worlds
By definition, epic fantasy involves a world with a creator. Tad Williams’s Osten Ard is the best since Tolkien’s Middle-earth.