VQR Online

The talk-show host recurses into himself, courtesy of Lawrence Lessig.

The 65-year-old author of “The Concubine” was held for about 21 hours earlier this week.

The winners of the Emily Clark Balch Prizes (for fiction and poetry) and the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction.

Mark Doty, Billy Collins, and Robert Pinsky get excited about a Thomas Hardy poem, plus CAPTCHA poetry, classifying profanity, and more.

I’d put up $20 that one of these six books will make the NYT Best Books of 2009.

On the night of August 3, 1944—in the hot crickety darkness of Riga, Latvia—my grandparents did two remarkable things. After midnight, while his children were sleeping, my grandfather—Harijs Mindenbergs—sat down at the kitchen table and...

Stucky was not a screenwriter by trade, but the market for historical fiction was poor and it seemed incredible that no one had ever made a biopic about Trotsky. Trotsky was the perfect Hollywood subject. History had conspired to preserve...

Heavenly earth flutters in the mind, word-borne.

This is the age of ashes.
Ashes of burned children,
of cold trials of hell,