Library of America
@libraryofamerica.bsky.social
Library of America is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to preserving America's best and most significant writing.
www.loa.org
www.loa.org
Last night, four acclaimed poets and scholars joined LOA LIVE for a fascinating personal discussion on revered critic and professor Helen Vendler. Watch @notquitehydepark.bsky.social, Dan Chiasson, @kjavadizadeh.bsky.social, and Christopher Spaide reflect on the influence of this towering figure.
Helen Vendler’s Sixth Sense
YouTube video by Library of America
youtu.be
December 3, 2025 at 5:45 PM
Last night, four acclaimed poets and scholars joined LOA LIVE for a fascinating personal discussion on revered critic and professor Helen Vendler. Watch @notquitehydepark.bsky.social, Dan Chiasson, @kjavadizadeh.bsky.social, and Christopher Spaide reflect on the influence of this towering figure.
Reposted by Library of America
‘Many things about “The Waste Land” seem to have annoyed Frost, some of which stemmed from his old disagreements with Pound. He disliked free verse, which he considered a lot of hot air and revealing of ignorance.’
Clare Bucknell on Robert Frost.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Clare Bucknell on Robert Frost.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Clare Bucknell · Discord and Fuss: Robert Frost’s Ugly Feelings
Robert Frost’s poetry has a way of lifting its gaze – with a heightening of register, a grand image, a weighty...
www.lrb.co.uk
December 2, 2025 at 7:56 PM
‘Many things about “The Waste Land” seem to have annoyed Frost, some of which stemmed from his old disagreements with Pound. He disliked free verse, which he considered a lot of hot air and revealing of ignorance.’
Clare Bucknell on Robert Frost.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Clare Bucknell on Robert Frost.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
This #GivingTuesday, we invite you to support Library of America! Your tax-deductible gift will be put to immediate use in LOA’s publishing and public humanities initiatives bringing American writing that matters to readers around the globe. www.loa.org/annualfund
December 2, 2025 at 2:41 PM
This #GivingTuesday, we invite you to support Library of America! Your tax-deductible gift will be put to immediate use in LOA’s publishing and public humanities initiatives bringing American writing that matters to readers around the globe. www.loa.org/annualfund
Tomorrow, 12/2, poets and scholars Stephanie Burt, Dan Chiasson, Christopher Spaide, and Kamran Javadazideh join LOA LIVE to discuss the towering legacy of Helen Vendler, the revered critic whose last essays were just published by Library of America. RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/helen-vend...
December 1, 2025 at 2:51 PM
Tomorrow, 12/2, poets and scholars Stephanie Burt, Dan Chiasson, Christopher Spaide, and Kamran Javadazideh join LOA LIVE to discuss the towering legacy of Helen Vendler, the revered critic whose last essays were just published by Library of America. RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/helen-vend...
If you missed last night’s stellar talk with @imaniperry.bsky.social and @tananarivedue.bsky.social on Octavia E. Butler, you can watch the entire program for free on YouTube. Hear these acclaimed writers delve into the genius of the Xenogenesis Trilogy, and catch rare audio of Butler herself!
The Radical Imagination of Octavia E. Butler
YouTube video by Library of America
youtube.com
November 25, 2025 at 6:08 PM
If you missed last night’s stellar talk with @imaniperry.bsky.social and @tananarivedue.bsky.social on Octavia E. Butler, you can watch the entire program for free on YouTube. Hear these acclaimed writers delve into the genius of the Xenogenesis Trilogy, and catch rare audio of Butler herself!
Next Monday, 11/24, two celebrated writers and scholars explore the craft and influence of Octavia E. Butler. Join @imaniperry.bsky.social and @tananarivedue.bsky.social for an evening dedicated to the revered SFF author’s luminous imagination. RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-radica...
November 21, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Next Monday, 11/24, two celebrated writers and scholars explore the craft and influence of Octavia E. Butler. Join @imaniperry.bsky.social and @tananarivedue.bsky.social for an evening dedicated to the revered SFF author’s luminous imagination. RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-radica...
The novelist Don DeLillo turns 89 today. Throughout his career, the books of this perennial Nobel Prize favorite have overflowed with ideas, language, personas, and historical fragments that, released into the minds of readers, transcend their fictional origins and become part of the real world.
Don DeLillo - Library of America
www.loa.org
November 20, 2025 at 4:04 PM
The novelist Don DeLillo turns 89 today. Throughout his career, the books of this perennial Nobel Prize favorite have overflowed with ideas, language, personas, and historical fragments that, released into the minds of readers, transcend their fictional origins and become part of the real world.
On this day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, among the most significant speeches in American history. Despite its 2-minute, 10-sentence duration, this immortal oration has resurfaced in everything from the remarks of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the Constitution of France.
November 19, 2025 at 9:43 PM
On this day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, among the most significant speeches in American history. Despite its 2-minute, 10-sentence duration, this immortal oration has resurfaced in everything from the remarks of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the Constitution of France.
On Tuesday, 12/2, join acclaimed poets and scholars Stephanie Burt, Dan Chiasson, Christopher Spaide, and @kjavadizadeh.bsky.social for a lively evening of reflections on the genius and influence of revered critic Helen Vendler, whose last essays were just published by LOA. RSVP for free!
Helen Vendler’s Sixth Sense
Poets and scholars Stephanie Burt, Dan Chiasson, Christopher Spaide, and Kamran Javadazideh reflect on a giant of poetry criticism
www.eventbrite.com
November 19, 2025 at 3:03 PM
On Tuesday, 12/2, join acclaimed poets and scholars Stephanie Burt, Dan Chiasson, Christopher Spaide, and @kjavadizadeh.bsky.social for a lively evening of reflections on the genius and influence of revered critic Helen Vendler, whose last essays were just published by LOA. RSVP for free!
Joan Didion staged her elaborate Thanksgiving meals “the same way she conjured her essays, novels, screenplays and memoirs, with an almost military mustering of planning and ambition,” writes Patrick Farrell in @nytimes.com.
Joan Didion’s Thanksgiving: Dinner for 75, Reams of Notes
www.nytimes.com
November 18, 2025 at 5:33 PM
Joan Didion staged her elaborate Thanksgiving meals “the same way she conjured her essays, novels, screenplays and memoirs, with an almost military mustering of planning and ambition,” writes Patrick Farrell in @nytimes.com.
John Updike’s newly published correspondence reveals a fascinating exchange with his LOA editor: “I am weak and growing weaker,” wrote the ailing Rabbit author a few months before his death in 2009, “but want to confide a few thoughts before fading away.” Read the essay on loa.org.
New Collection of Letters Highlights John Updike’s LOA Legacy - Library of America
John Updike was among the most prolific writers of his generation, producing, novelist Orhan Pamuk wrote in The New York Times, an “encyclopedic array of the thousands of facets of human experience.” ...
www.loa.org
November 17, 2025 at 7:07 PM
John Updike’s newly published correspondence reveals a fascinating exchange with his LOA editor: “I am weak and growing weaker,” wrote the ailing Rabbit author a few months before his death in 2009, “but want to confide a few thoughts before fading away.” Read the essay on loa.org.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats makes the @publisherswkly.bsky.social Holiday Gift Guide for 2025! “This volume collects feline-centric poetry, comics, and other works by the much-lauded author better known for her speculative fiction, who also harbored an affection for cats.” She certainly did!
Holiday Gift Guide 2025: Illustrated & Art Books
We’ve got books for everyone from art enthusiasts and Austenites to architecture admirers and animal lovers.
www.publishersweekly.com
November 14, 2025 at 7:31 PM
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats makes the @publisherswkly.bsky.social Holiday Gift Guide for 2025! “This volume collects feline-centric poetry, comics, and other works by the much-lauded author better known for her speculative fiction, who also harbored an affection for cats.” She certainly did!
Explore giants of American literature during our annual holiday boxed set sale. Collected works, complete editions, sagas, trilogies, compendiums, and more. See all boxed sets at loa.org/boxedsets. Sale ends Tuesday, 11/25
November 13, 2025 at 7:35 PM
Explore giants of American literature during our annual holiday boxed set sale. Collected works, complete editions, sagas, trilogies, compendiums, and more. See all boxed sets at loa.org/boxedsets. Sale ends Tuesday, 11/25
The first volume of Emily Dickinson’s Poems was published posthumously 135 years ago, on November 12, 1890. After discovering the manuscripts in which Dickinson had collected her writing, her sister, Lavinia, worked to have the poems edited and published—igniting a bitter family feud in the process.
November 12, 2025 at 11:05 PM
The first volume of Emily Dickinson’s Poems was published posthumously 135 years ago, on November 12, 1890. After discovering the manuscripts in which Dickinson had collected her writing, her sister, Lavinia, worked to have the poems edited and published—igniting a bitter family feud in the process.
On Monday, 11/24, join @imaniperry.bsky.social and @tananarivedue.bsky.social for an online program on Octavia E. Butler, speculative fiction trailblazer and author of Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy, just out from Library of America. RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-radica...
November 11, 2025 at 5:43 PM
On Monday, 11/24, join @imaniperry.bsky.social and @tananarivedue.bsky.social for an online program on Octavia E. Butler, speculative fiction trailblazer and author of Lilith’s Brood: The Xenogenesis Trilogy, just out from Library of America. RSVP for free: www.eventbrite.com/e/the-radica...
Spotted in The Diplomat on Netflix: a row of Library of America books behind White House Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (played by Nana Mensah). Hard to see the individual volumes, though pretty sure that’s Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle Part One on the left. S3 E7 for the curious.
November 10, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Spotted in The Diplomat on Netflix: a row of Library of America books behind White House Chief of Staff Billie Appiah (played by Nana Mensah). Hard to see the individual volumes, though pretty sure that’s Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle Part One on the left. S3 E7 for the curious.
Playwright John Guare declared war on the kitchen sink, aiming instead for “a theatrical world three or four (or nine or ten) sizes larger than realism.” On our website, dramaturg and co-editor of the new LOA edition of Guare’s plays Michael Paller reflects on the Six Degrees of Separation author.
“War on the Kitchen Sink”: Michael Paller on the Larger-Than-Life Plays of John Guare - Library of America
In the plays of John Guare, the fourth wall dissolves to disclose a thrilling truth: anything can happen here. In a career extending from the 1960s to the present day, this “uncannily prophetic” playw...
www.loa.org
November 7, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Playwright John Guare declared war on the kitchen sink, aiming instead for “a theatrical world three or four (or nine or ten) sizes larger than realism.” On our website, dramaturg and co-editor of the new LOA edition of Guare’s plays Michael Paller reflects on the Six Degrees of Separation author.
“Just as she claimed New York for herself without seeking approval or permission, Swenson followed her poetic muse unapologetically, immune to negative criticism.” In @theartsfuse.bsky.social, a look at Margaret A. Brucia’s revelatory new biography of the ahead-of-her-time poet May Swenson.
Book Review: Putting Words into Dreams - Poet May Swenson - The Arts Fuse
Optimistic, a canny survivor, relentless, genderfluid—poet May Swenson described herself as “I am one of those to whom miracles happen."
artsfuse.org
November 6, 2025 at 4:38 PM
“Just as she claimed New York for herself without seeking approval or permission, Swenson followed her poetic muse unapologetically, immune to negative criticism.” In @theartsfuse.bsky.social, a look at Margaret A. Brucia’s revelatory new biography of the ahead-of-her-time poet May Swenson.
In @clereviewbooks.bsky.social, a deeply original dive into Don DeLillo’s JFK assassination epic Libra in the form of “twelve bullets, four appendices, and six exhibits.” “DeLillo’s Libra is a book about the entanglement of reading, writing, and living,” Nicole Kaack explains.
Twelve Bullets, Four Appendices, and Six Exhibits: On Don DeLillo’s “Libra” - Cleveland Review of Books
Writers, like lone gunmen, are compulsive worldbuilders. They write their own past, present, and future. DeLillo has described himself as a man in a small room.
clereviewofbooks.com
November 5, 2025 at 9:30 PM
In @clereviewbooks.bsky.social, a deeply original dive into Don DeLillo’s JFK assassination epic Libra in the form of “twelve bullets, four appendices, and six exhibits.” “DeLillo’s Libra is a book about the entanglement of reading, writing, and living,” Nicole Kaack explains.
Two weeks after casting her ballot in the 1872 Presidential election on November 5, Susan B. Anthony was arrested and charged with “knowingly voting without having a lawful right to vote.” Convicted and fined $100, Anthony called the verdict “the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded.”
November 5, 2025 at 2:45 PM
Two weeks after casting her ballot in the 1872 Presidential election on November 5, Susan B. Anthony was arrested and charged with “knowingly voting without having a lawful right to vote.” Convicted and fined $100, Anthony called the verdict “the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded.”
“One imagines Chester Himes as a species of cactus lurking along the edges of the literary landscape,” writes Gene Seymour in @thenation.com. Best known for his Harlem noirs, Himes inspired the beleaguered Black American writer at the center of John A. Williams’s 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am.
Chester Himes’s Harlem Noirs
Himes helped reinvent the idea of the detective novel. He also transformed it into a powerful vehicle for social criticism.
www.thenation.com
November 4, 2025 at 2:54 PM
“One imagines Chester Himes as a species of cactus lurking along the edges of the literary landscape,” writes Gene Seymour in @thenation.com. Best known for his Harlem noirs, Himes inspired the beleaguered Black American writer at the center of John A. Williams’s 1967 novel, The Man Who Cried I Am.
Reposted by Library of America
Stephen Crane, The Upturned Face (via @libraryofamerica.bsky.social; #skystorians; drawing of a dead soldier, mid-nineteenth century; black, white chalk, graphite on gray-green paper by Ange-Louis Janet Lange [1815–1872], courtesy of Cooper Hewitt): storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/10/the-...
November 1, 2025 at 12:58 PM
Stephen Crane, The Upturned Face (via @libraryofamerica.bsky.social; #skystorians; drawing of a dead soldier, mid-nineteenth century; black, white chalk, graphite on gray-green paper by Ange-Louis Janet Lange [1815–1872], courtesy of Cooper Hewitt): storyoftheweek.loa.org/2025/10/the-...
For Halloween, a reappraisal of Shirley Jackson’s “definitive American horror novel” in City Journal: “Jackson infuses The Haunting of Hill House not only with a requisite number of shivers but also with a human factor missing in so much of the subsequent novels indebted to her vision.”
Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House: The Definitive American Horror Novel
It’s a unique mix of gothic terror, black humor, and psychological suspense.
www.city-journal.org
October 31, 2025 at 8:54 PM
For Halloween, a reappraisal of Shirley Jackson’s “definitive American horror novel” in City Journal: “Jackson infuses The Haunting of Hill House not only with a requisite number of shivers but also with a human factor missing in so much of the subsequent novels indebted to her vision.”
Helen Vendler read and wrote about poetry with an unmatched eye for the “person behind, or inside, or alongside, the poem, assembling language so that it fits how they have lived and how they feel.” On loa.org, scholar and poet Stephanie Burt, who studied with Vendler, reflects on her influence.
“Putting the Poem First”: Stephanie Burt on the Towering Literary Legacy of Helen Vendler - Library of America
Helen Vendler, the leading poetry critic of her generation, sought the electrifying moment when all the parts of a work of verse click into place, “relating all to each, as a sudden shaft of light ill...
www.loa.org
October 31, 2025 at 3:12 PM
Helen Vendler read and wrote about poetry with an unmatched eye for the “person behind, or inside, or alongside, the poem, assembling language so that it fits how they have lived and how they feel.” On loa.org, scholar and poet Stephanie Burt, who studied with Vendler, reflects on her influence.
“[John] Adams wears his heart on his sleeve and reveals all of his ambitions, doubts, and insecurities, especially in his diary, which is one of the greatest and most readable in all of American literature,” writes Gordon S. Wood. The Founding Father and second president was born 290 years ago OTD.
Against American exceptionalism: Gordon S. Wood on John Adams - Library of America
John Adams, c. 1800/1815, by Gilbert Stuart. (National Gallery of Art) This spring Library of America releases John Adams: Writings from the New Nation 1784–1826, the third and final volume of Gordon ...
www.loa.org
October 30, 2025 at 3:21 PM
“[John] Adams wears his heart on his sleeve and reveals all of his ambitions, doubts, and insecurities, especially in his diary, which is one of the greatest and most readable in all of American literature,” writes Gordon S. Wood. The Founding Father and second president was born 290 years ago OTD.