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Gabriel Winslow-Yost
Out of Time

Bill Watterson’s first book since Calvin and Hobbes envisions a medieval world on the brink of extinction.

Nathaniel Rich
Writing Under Fire

In Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II, James Heffernan argues that for a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.

Colm Tóibín
In the Streets of Barcelona

In Antagony, the Spanish writer Luis Goytisolo attempts to imagine a new sort of novel in which the streets have the force of character and urban topography has its own destiny.

Ange Mlinko
Patterns of Uprooting

On opposite sides of the world—Poland and Uruguay—the poets Ida Vitale and Tomasz Różycki share a close attention to their own languages.

The Forest/
Wanting a Child

a poem by
Lindsay Turner

Wan light, weightless.
With the leaves down, the ridge
shows
through the trees, rounded and
solid and trust-
worthy.

Up in the mountains
in the forest, the temperatures drop…

Jo Livingstone
Aloe, Basil, Cash Crop

A show at the Morgan Library presents rare specimens of the early modern herbal—botanical textbooks that shaped how we learn plant science.

Free from the Archives

On December 30, 1916, a cabal of Russian nobles assassinated the enigmatic Grigory Rasputin, and stories of his seemingly impossible death soon transformed into legends. In our March 29, 2001, issue, Viktor Erofeyev reviewed Edvard Radzinsky’s biography, The Rasputin File, and picked apart the unusual circumstances that conspired to bring a Siberian peasant into the confidences of the Russian imperial family, where he came to represent the decadent world of “eroticism, mysticism, and occultism” that fueled the anger of the February Revolution two months after his murder.

Viktor Erofeyev
The Possessed

“Rasputin slumbers in the heart of every Russian. But sometimes he doesn’t slumber. If you awaken the Rasputin in yourself, life suddenly overflows its banks: you begin to experience a fierce, incomparable joy from being in a state of outrageousness, dissipation, restlessness, suffering, and desecration. ‘Violence is the soul’s joy,’ Rasputin taught.”

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