Our Autumn 2024 issue has arrived! Highlights include @lahenion’s search for a wondrous, night-blooming flower; Joseph Horowitz’s celebration of Charles Ives; Augustine Sedgwick on Henry David Thoreau’s connections to slavery, and more.

“All this just yesterday. Yesterday, so full of meaning and life. But I would never trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday, as Kris Kristofferson sings in ‘Me and Bobby McGee.’”

The Norse sagas may tell of “warriors scrubbing beer kegs and Valkyries pouring glasses of wine in the afterlife,” but in Eleanor Barraclough’s new book, the exploits of the workaday Viking are every bit as interesting.

Clellan Coe often wonders whether she is living an interesting life, but certain unexpected, deceptively simple conversations with her students help her to realize that an interesting life might just be “any life at all.”

“I am a frog I live under a spell I live at the bottom of a green well.” Listen to Amanda Holmes read “The Frog Prince” by Stevie Smith: ?utm_source=social_media&medium=twitter

“Come then, royal girl and royal times, Come quickly, I can be happy until you come But I cannot be heavenly, Only disenchanted people can be heavenly.” ?utm_source=social_media&medium=twitter

Forget Viking hoards: in her new book, historian Eleanor Barraclough unearths stunning objects of the everyday, from the runes women carved to fetch their lovers home from the pub to the scribblings of a wee child.

On this week’s episode of Read Me a Poem, Amanda Holmes shares Stevie Smith’s “The Frog Prince.” ?utm_source=social_media&medium=twitter

The Norse sagas may tell of “warriors scrubbing beer kegs and Valkyries pouring glasses of wine in the afterlife,” but in Eleanor Barraclough’s new book, the exploits of the workaday Viking are every bit as interesting.

The Norse sagas may tell of “warriors scrubbing beer kegs and Valkyries pouring glasses of wine in the afterlife,” but in Eleanor Barraclough’s new book, the exploits of the workaday Viking are every bit as interesting.

The British poet Stevie Smith wrote a number of poems that blended nursery rhyme cadence with a more macabre subject—like this week’s selection, “The Frog Prince.” ?utm_source=social_media&medium=twitter

In her new book, “Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age,” the historian Eleanor Barraclough pushes aside the raiders and valkyries to put ordinary people at the center of the story.

That southerners, too, felt they were engaged in a righteous struggle is indicative of religion’s complex role in the Civil War, the subject of Richard Carwardine’s new book from @aaknopf.

Paige Ledom’s artistic project of the past three years: using paper she finds around her house to make collages depicting still lives and scenes of her everyday experience, or “portraits of the home,” as she calls them.

Eliot Stein's new book, “Custodians of Wonder,” is a paean to human ingenuity in the face of evolving technology and culture, and to the creative spirit that continues to fuel the places that we call home.

There is a special kind of relationship that forms at local specialty shops, writes Clellan Coe. It’s easy to chat with employees about “a sick grandson, an old mother, a trip to Cádiz …”

“The man attends to any signal that might announce Jesus. He hopes for even the faintest evidence, the presence of the Lord's least abundance.”

Spending most of his adult life outside of Academic poetry, this week’s Read Me a Poem comes from Jack Gilbert and reflects the solitude he maintained throughout his life.

There is a special kind of relationship that forms at local specialty shops, writes Clellan Coe. It’s easy to chat with employees about “a sick grandson, an old mother, a trip to Cádiz …”

On this week’s episode of Read Me a Poem, Amanda Holmes shares Jack Gilbert’s “The White Heart of God.

“The implication was that you couldn’t be too careful,” Clellan Coe writes of recent repairs to her home in this week’s Asturias Days column. “He had played on my lack of knowledge and my tendency to imagine a disaster.”