Sponsored by Duke University Press

Larry Rohter
The Inventor of Magical Realism

It remains a mystery why Miguel Ángel Asturias’s brilliant novel Mr. President remains less well known in the English-speaking world than the many novels it inspired.

Anna Shechtman
Wages for Housewives

The Real Housewives’ work is to produce drama, and to keep their jobs they must be prolific.

The Deer

a poem by
Ama Codjoe

Walking alone in a forest, I came upon
a deer—this was not a vision.
It faced me, on its four thin legs,
unmoved as a cave painting
brushed by light. I made myself still…

Edward Ball
‘Tell Your Story, Omar’

A new, Pulitzer Prize–winning opera adapts the memoir of Omar ibn Said, an African Muslim who spent much of his life enslaved in North Carolina.

Tausif Noor
Kelly Akashi’s Ecology of Craft

With a mastery of diverse materials and traditions from glassblowing to stone carving, the sculptor blends natural history and family history.

Free from the Archives

In The New York Review of Books’s September 30, 1976, issue, Helen Vendler wrote about Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, a book of “autobiographical episodes interspersed through much longer reflections attempting to analyze motherhood as a social institution.”

Helen Vendler
Myths for Mothers

“Of motherhood, says Rich, ‘I could remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and division within myself: a division made more acute by the moments of passionate love.’ It is useful to have it said forcefully that the institution of motherhood (the nuclear family, the mother’s exclusive responsibility for the children) is not identical with bearing and caring for children.”