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Join our discussions below about "The Night Circus." Here's who you'll be hearing from... Andrew Losowsky, Books Editor I'm British, so anything y...

This month, the series focuses on just two collections: works of such extraordinary merit that they require a longer-than-usual treatment: Peter Gizzi's Threshold Songs and Dean Young's Bender: New and Selected Poems.

The exact nature of Shakespeare's illness, and subsequent death, remains unknown, and is still the subject of much speculation. Here are the hypotheses currently debated by scholars.

William Shakespeare's character Othello is generally regarded as a black African. But is this true? Could he have been an Arab or a Spanish Moor?

To celebrate Shakespeare's birthday, we're featuring some of our favorite archival pieces about his life and work. This one was first published in Aug...

Something in it piqued our curiosity and we had to stop reading, or felt we had to. The days of sinking into a book in happy oblivion of the world around us had almost vanished.

This week we began reading the Karl Marlantes novel, 'What It Is Like To Go To War' and though Marlantes has just touched the surface of some very dee...

If there is something singularly grandiose, didactic, and even preposterous about A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon it must forgiven in light of the fact that its author believes all he writes

Begging for blurbs is one of the more misery-producing aspects of being published. It can leave us desperate and depressed. It's humiliating to have to grovel for blurbs, rather than have your publisher secure them for you.

Alcott loved the dish so much that she nicknamed her house after it. Orchard House famously provided the setting for Little Women.

There is an inimitable deftness of language in Jericho Brown's work; the level of torque and tension in these lines is enough to snap the neck of even the most jaded reader of contemporary poetry.

Brigitte Byrd's cerebral prose poems are couched in an air of hyper-rationality that belies their visceral energy.

Equal parts allegorical, rhetorical, and anecdotal, Yes, Master is -- the cover art compels a sports metaphor -- not a touchdown. It's not a touchdown because it's far more than that.

The Monterey International Pop Festival took place at such a guileless time that the promoters used the word "pop" in its title. Not long after this would have been unthinkable, after the lines were drawn between "pop" music and rock and roll.

Under Virga, Joe Amato (Chax Press, 2006). This glorious mess is an exhausting but also exhilarating archive of language and metalanguage.

Those of us who've long been enamored with Rae Armantrout should do better at letting others in on the secret: This poet is the sort of Master whose poetics can inform, instruct, and inspire an entire generation of writers.

"Picture books celebrate childhood. They speak universal truths and help children better understand the world around them."

The aim of this ongoing review series is to highlight superlative books of poetry from the last 10 years. Each entry offers an unranked, non-exhaustive list of such collections comprised of brief descriptions of each text and an excerpt.

Four hundred years after he wrote them, Shakespeare's words can be imbued with a brand new set of values, simply by re-arranging them on the page.

These are simply books which achieve excellence in some manner or another, and which consequently (in the view of this author) deserve a wider audience.

Here are ten books that you may want to share with kids and teens in preparation for the 10th anniversary of September 11th.

The two most written about themes in fiction? Love and death. Yet however strange the circumstances that writers may invent, real circumstances of dea...

From celebrities to politicians to us, people around the globe have been tweeting to the world. But who better to entertain you with a few words than ...