Michael Robbins

Rae Armantrout’s new collection continues to find the right ‘wrong’ word

May 9, 2019 at 11:18 p.m.

I initially misread the title of Rae Armantrout's new collection as "Party," then opened the book to these lines: "Wait, I haven't found / the right word yet." These fortuities...

David Bentley Hart's latest collection of essays may be smug, but it offers a worthy challenge to believers and unbelievers alike.

Review: David Bentley Hart’s ‘Splendid Wickedness’

May 9, 2019 at 11:17 p.m.

My two favorite contemporary writers on religion in America are the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson and the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart. They don't have much in common...

Review: Gay Talese’s ‘Voyeur’s Motel’

May 9, 2019 at 11:16 p.m.

If you follow the weather in the teapot of publishing, you'll know that 84-year-old New Journalism icon Gay Talese has had a rocky year. He was already drawing heavy fire...

Michael Robbins: In defense of book collecting

May 9, 2019 at 11:14 p.m.

As of this writing there are 1,790 books in my apartment, some couple hundred in my campus office, and an unknown number floating about on loan to various friends and...

Two collections by Teffi, a favorite of both Lenin and Nicholas II, have recently been published by NYRB Classics.

Remembering Teffi: ‘Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others and Me’ reviewed

May 9, 2019 at 11:13 p.m.

If Teffi hadn't existed, no one could have invented her. Read and admired by Nicholas II and Lenin, scornful of the Whites and the Bolsheviks, pursued in vain by Rasputin,...

Poetry for the Purple One: A look at the lyrics of Prince

May 9, 2019 at 11:10 p.m.

Prince Rogers Nelson was dead, and social media feeds were flooding with a line from a 400-year-old play. "Goodnight, sweet Prince" had an inevitable ring, but given 2016's massacre of...

Volunteers work to help clear out the debris from a CVS in Baltimore. The CVS Pharmacy that was destroyed during the riots in Baltimore last April has reopened.

‘Riot. Strike. Riot’: Joshua Clover’s timely and audacious analysis

May 9, 2019 at 11:08 p.m.

On April 27, 2015, I sat watching a CVS in West Baltimore burn on TV. Rioters milled about in the haze. A phalanx of dozens of riot cops advanced slowly...

Appreciating John Williams’ anthology of ‘English Renaissance Poetry’

May 9, 2019 at 11:06 p.m.

Here is a characteristic sentence from David Norbrook's introduction to "The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse," published in 1992: Like More, Wyatt found it impossible to find a public discourse...

A girl suspected of being infected with the Ebola virus has her temperature checked at the government hospital in Kenema, Sierra Leone, on Aug. 16, 2014. In "Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond," Sonia Shah argues that a catastrophic pandemic is a matter of when, not if, and talks about the origins of microbe-based catastrophe.

New book argues next pandemic a question of when, not if

May 9, 2019 at 11:03 p.m.

I carry a small bottle of hand sanitizer wherever I go. I try to avoid touching doorknobs, I hate shaking hands, and the sound of a cough spikes my heart...

Reissue of Robert Adams’ ‘The New West’ revives Colorado’s Front Range

May 9, 2019 at 11:02 p.m.

The poet Charles Olson in "Call Me Ishmael," his grand, cracked study of "Moby-Dick": "I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave...

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