First published nearly a decade prior to the Civil War, "The Heroic Slave" is the only fictional work by abolitionist, orator, author, and social reformer Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave. It is inspired by the true story of Madison Washing...

Tolstoy produced many drafts of "Anna Karenina". Crafting and recrafting each sentence with careful intent, his use of language was anything but casual. His project, translator Marian Schwartz observes, "was to bend language to his will, as an instru...

This book explores Oscar Wilde's fascination with the eighteenth-century forger Thomas Chatterton, who tragically took his life at the age of seventeen. This innovative study combines a scholarly monograph with a textual edition of the extensive note...

At the turn of the fifteenth century, private devotionals became a speciality of the renowned Ghent-Bruges illuminators. Wealthy patrons who commissioned work from these artists often spared no expense in the presentation of their personal prayer boo...

Most people outside Italy know Pier Paolo Pasolini for his films, many of which began as literary works – "Arabian Nights", "The Gospel According to Matthew", "The Decameron", and "The Canterbury Tales" among them. What most people are not aware of i...

Poetry is often said to resist translation, its integration of form and meaning rendering even the best translations problematic. Elizabeth Marie Young disagrees, and with "Translation as Muse", she uses the work of the celebrated Roman poet Catullus...

"All art and the love of art", Victor Brombert writes at the beginning of the deeply personal "Musings on Mortality", "allow us to negate our nothingness". As a young man returning from World War II, Brombert came to understand this truth as he immer...

When Jessa Crispin was thirty, she burned her settled Chicago life to the ground and took off for Berlin with a pair of suitcases and no plan beyond leaving. Half a decade later, she's still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understa...

To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways – guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry's stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed artic...

This World and That One Sometimes you defy it, I am not that, watching a stranger cry like a dog when she thinks she's alone at the kitchen window, hands forgotten under the running tap. The curtains blow out, flap the other side of the sill. In you...