One of the many things I liked about Annie Dillard’s 1989 nonfiction book The Writing Life is her discussion of how writers choose what they write, how they should choose.  [...]

Throughout most of human history, children grew up watching plants grow and become food. They helped plant seeds. They helped tend the field or orchard. They helped harvest the rice [...]

On the opening page of his text for The Madonna, Jean Guitton, a French philosopher and theologian, notes that, in the Gospels, Mary doesn’t say much. That got me thinking, [...]

Twenty-three-year-old Will Andrews looks around him and sees the rich, vibrant, beautiful abundance of the natural world.  This happens at many, many points in John Williams’s 1960 novel Butcher’s Crossing. [...]

It’s pretty clear, early on, that Garry Ashe, young and silkily clever, is a murderer although maybe not the person responsible for the killing at the center of the 1997 [...]

For nearly half a century, Robert Alter has been reading and analyzing the books of the Hebrew Bible as works of literature and has become a towering presence in the [...]

Abraham Lincoln’s friend and courtroom colleague Henry Clay Whitney remembered him as a man with an agile and restless mind, as “a versatile genius, whether as a man or boy. [...]

Peter Ackroyd’s The English Soul: Faith of a Nation, published by the University of Chicago Press, is a rich and odd book — rich because of the author’s storytelling skill [...]