Lord, Hear My Voice

Bin Ramke’s Theory of Mind highlights a career of strange poems that drill deeply into a life’s worth of pain and joy.
Craig Morgan Teicher

Nothing To Fear

Those who see a clash of civilizations due to Muslim immigration in Europe are wrong on every detail that matters.
John R. Bowen

BR’s Josh Cohen and Contributing Editor Glenn Loury compare Obama’s and Reagan’s first years.

---

essays

Counterinsurgency’s Comeback

Can a colonialist strategy be reinvented?
Nasser Hussain

Sidney Mintz and Colin Dayan
on Haitian history and the current crisis

The Big Bank Theory

How government helps financial giants get richer
Dean Baker

State of the Nation: the State of Boston

A mayoral election special
Stephen Ansolabehere

The Lost Radical

Edward Carpenter’s democracy of the soul
Vivian Gornick

State of the Nation: the Supreme Court

What do Americans think about property, punishment, and privacy?
Stephen Ansolabehere

Biography and the Bench

Albie Sachs’s The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law
Ryan Thoreson

Edit This Page

Wikipedia: what makes it work—and can it last?
Evgeny Morozov
Listen to Morozov on NPR’s “Here & Now”

Statement of Support for Iranian Universities (PDF)

More Essays

---

fiction

Wednesday Nights—memoir

Vestal McIntyre

Everything is Breakable with a Big Enough Stone—story

Taryn Bowe

Fine By Me

Geoff Dyer’s unlikely terms of engagement
James Wallenstein

Desperately Seeking Sam

Remembering Beckett twenty years after his death
Roger Boylan

One, Two, Three, and Four Rabbits—story

Aura Estrada

Where’s Your Sense of Humor?—story

Aura Estrada

Life Work

Nicholson Baker grows up
John Crowley

Last Wishes

Nabokov’s last request was the destruction, by fire, of the notes for the newly-published The Original of Laura.
Leland de la Durantaye

Hear the author on NPR’s On Point.

More Fiction & Fiction Essays

---

Purely Coincidental

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds
Alan A. Stone

Fool’s Gold

Sacha Baron Cohen’s comic genius lies in his ability to play the wise fool. But as Brüno, Baron Cohen seems more the victim than the jokester.
Alan A. Stone

Sound Barrier

Joe Wright’s The Soloist
Alan A. Stone

Purple Gaze

José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia
Alan A. Stone

 Sites of interest: Personal Loans

1977: Borges on the Right
Katherine Singer Kovacs on Jorge Luis Borges’s turn to the right.
2005: The Power and the Glory
Howard Zinn (1922-2010) on American exceptionalism.
2000: Patrick Erouart-Siad on Haitian literature

---

Forums

Something from Nothing

A forum on strategy in Afghanistan with Nir Rosen, Helena Cobban, Andrew Exum, Andrew J. Bacevich, and others. Web-only responses by Rajan Menon and Richard W. Miller.

Investigative Special

A Death in Texas

Profits, poverty, and immigration converge
Tom Barry

God, the Army, and PTSD

Is religion an obstacle to treatment?
Tara McKelvey

An Ugly Peace

What changed in Iraq
Nir Rosen

More Forums & Special Issues

---

poetry

Smothered to Smithereens

The poetics of motherhood
Stephen Burt

World Tumbling into World

Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary and This Nest, Swift Passerine
B.K. Fischer

A Distant Pleasure

New translations of C.P. Cavafy
Keith Taylor

Martin Luther King Day—Web only

William Varner

The Pale Side of the Leaves

D. Nurkse

The Transit of the Beautiful

L.S. Klatt

Liquefaction

L.S. Klatt

Oneiric Theory

Miranda Field

Nocturama: Novel Excerpt

Christine Hume

Nebenwelt

Cynthia Cruz

Carnival

Andre Bagoo

Politic

Nick Courtright

Forage

Amelia Klein

Poet’s Sampler: Farnoosh Fathi

Introduced by Christine Hume

2009 Poetry Contest Winner

Congratulations to John Gallaher, whose “Guidebook” series won BR’s 12th annual contest. As he writes, “It’s pretty plain, I admit. But it’s solid. Look, hit it. Hit it as hard as you can.”

Microreviews

James Tate
Susan Parr
D.A. Powell
Brian Teare
Allison Benis White

More Poetry & Poetry Criticism