The American Scholar

Until recently, whenever I read a novel or a play, I largely forgot its contents within a matter of weeks. The words and events would drain through me, leaving me, at best, with isolated remnants. I marveled at people who could describe in detail passages they’d read years before. They seemed to have been bestowed with some freakish gift of the gods.

But one day someth...

It was August, and my mother’s friend Fritz had recently opened up his second art gallery in Magdalena, New Mexico, just down the street from my mother’s house. He was eager to show it to us, and we were eager to see it. The gallery didn’t have regular hours, but when we had a free moment and called, Fritz came to show us around. He unlocked the door and ushered us in.

Amanda Holmes reads Robert Hayden’s “Monet’s Waterlilies.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: [email protected]. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David L...

Photography runs in Jill Enfield’s family. Her ancestors owned and operated camera shops in Frankfurt, Germany, for nearly a century until the Third Reich forced them to flee to the United States in the 1930s. The Leitz family, who founded Leica Cameras, sponsored the Enfields’ visas and he...

Bogs exist in the liminal space between water and land, haunted by will-o’-the-wisps and home to carnivorous plants, equally ready to suck in unsuspecting wanderers or disgorge eerily preserved ancient artifacts—or bodies. Long relegated to the purview of horror films or dismissed as wastelands, bogs have been sites of historical resistance and refuge in the past while quietl...