“My other best friend, Sean, is slowly going blind, and I was thinking of it that night for a variety of reasons.”

“How well that lie sits on the tongue of American capitalism—it’s not other women you need, not equality for all women. It’s the exceptionalism of you.”

Poet Joshua Rivkin’s new book about Cy Twombly is “stranger and more personal than a biography.”

The first room held Twombly’s earliest paintings and sculptures—minimal, abstract, all white or grey, etched with nervous scratches and scribbles. They felt ancient and half-tortured and alive.

Jonathan Lee’s new novel, High Dive, focuses on the events leading up to the 1984 bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, an Irish Republican Army assassination attempt on Margaret Thatcher. Lee follows both sides, moving with ease between t…

My poetry shelf is slim but holds the most thumbed book I own: John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and, until recently, I would read several songs a week, rereading my favorites as if they held some kind of clue. I read them to cheer myself or wallo…