In Alan Rossi’s, Mountain Road, Late at Night, Nathaniel, from whose perspective the first quarter of the novel is told, has just lost his brother, Nicholas, who he remembers as having had “beautiful and ardent thoughts about life,” but who…
Ukraine has a starring role in our news today, so it might seem beside the point to remember when it was not the subject of so much purported expertise, when its eastern cities were engulfed by a different sort of…
As the title of Marian Crotty’s award-winning short story collection, What Counts as Love, suggests, what counts is not always the same as what’s hoped for, but may be exactly what’s expected, for in love’s pursuit, her characters go about…
The Eastern Shore by Ward Just The Great American Political Novel, from Henry Adam’s Democracy, to Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, from Toni Morrison's Beloved, to Ward Just’s Echo House, tangles with the notion of America as an…
“Abandon Yiddish.” The masters of the Enlightenment might as well have said abandon hope, for all the impact this particular prescription for a better life would have on its intended beneficiaries. Never mind that Yiddish had been their language for…
A great poet does not so much meet the demands of his or her time but, granted unerring insight, discovers them. Such insight can bestow an enormous isolation that he or she may, of course, disguise, or, like Sophocles’ Philoctetes,…
Every time you try to make a meme—literary or historic or geographic—of the Mid-Atlantic, much less one in which the three align, you are upended by the power of some new discovery of person, place or past. The region’s countless…
That Henry Greenbaum spoke November 16th at the Germantown campus of Montgomery College recounting his experiences living in the ghetto, enduring death marches as well as slave labor in concentration camps after the loss of his mother and five of…
Whether or not the great American novel has been written, the great Washington D.C. novel, arguably, has not. Much that happens here is documented—there is an archive for nearly everything—but the inner lives of our citizens are seriously underreported. Spiritual…
Because E. Ethelbert Miller’s poetry maintains a steady and accessible attachment to our national narrative, Kirsten Porter, editor of The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller, is able, before launching into a formal discussion of his poems, to ask "if…