Almost 20 years later, Beckett was rejected with gusto again when he submitted two novels, Molloy, and Malone Dies. An American publisher dismissed them as unfunny, senseless and dull. “There’s no ...

For the past week the most played songs in my 26-year-old Honda CRV have been ABBA’s “Fernando” (“There was something in the air that night, the stars were bright”) and Patti Smith’s “In My Blakean ...

“I spent a good part of my 15th year puzzling over drafts of poems by Dylan Thomas… often copying out each successive draft myself… trying to deduce... the reason for revisions in sound”. So wrote ...

Sylvia Plath, a brilliant American poet and novelist, captured the raw edges of mental illness and identity in mid-20th-century America. Her life, marked by early promise and profound loss, culminated ...

From Seamus Heaney’s collected poems and Simon Armitage’s animal spirits, to prizewinners Karen Solie and Vidyan Ravinthiran Many of 2025’s most notable collections have been powered by a spirit of ...

As I have every year since 2014, in 2025 I set aside a couple of months to peruse the year’s books of poetry — at least those books I had on hand. In the past, I’ve titled my annual roundup — one ...

What happens when writers embrace artificial intelligence as their muse? By A.O. Scott Those who complete this year’s race in October will receive a medal that reads, “There are no strangers here; ...

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF W. B. YEATS (480 pp.]—Macm/7/an ($5). A month before his death in 1939, Irish Poet William Butler Yeats wrote to a friend: “And I do nothing but write verse.” It was not the ...

There’s a strong sense of the numinous in the writing of Conor McPherson. From his first hit The Weir to the Bob Dylan-inspired musical Girl From the North Country, there’s always a feeling of ...

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A poor student who never went to university, only to painting school, William Butler Yeats professed a scorn for scholarship. Nonetheless, he became an active critic. Financial need motivated much of ...

Knowing Scot Lehigh’s literary proclivities, I wondered whether, besides being a nod to deficit hawks, there was a reference to W.B. Yeats in the columnist’s questioning of “Republican conservatives ...