Paul Auster, a prolific, prize-winning man of letters and filmmaker known for such inventive narratives and meta-narratives as The New York Trilogy and 4321, has died at age 77. Auster’s death was confirmed on May 1 by his literary representatives, the Carol Mann Agency, which did not immediately provide additional details. Auster had been diagnosed … Read more
It’s only April, but it’s hard to imagine any album will be heard more this year than Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department. The album took less than 12 hours to break this year’s record for most single-day Spotify streams, and is projected to sell two million units in its first week. On Thursday, Spotify … Read more
Baidu’s Ernie 4 artificial intelligence (AI) model, one of China’s leading large language models (LLMs), has outperformed similar technologies from US peers in generating Chinese texts such as those in the style of Imperial Chinese poetry, according to Robin Li Yanhong, co-founder and CEO of the internet search giant. In an hour-long programme aired by … Read more
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Photograph by Ladan Osman Donika Kelly joins Kevin Young to read “One Hundred White-Sided Dolphins on a Summer Day,” by Mary Oliver, and her own poem “Sixteen Center.” Kelly is the author of … Read more
It may come as no surprise that a country as deeply polarized by its recent history as Chile is also at war over the relevance of its preëminent poet, Pablo Neruda. In December, fifty years after the coup d’état that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, Chileans rejected an attempt to write a new constitution … Read more
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Photograph by Marcus Jackson Richie Hofmann joins Kevin Young to read “Twilight,” by Henri Cole, and his own poem “French Novel.” Hofmann is the author of two collections of poetry and the recipient … Read more
In a remembrance, the poet Sergei Gandlevsky, one of the people who knew Rubinstein best, called him “implausibly sociable.” He was not indiscriminate—he didn’t suffer fools, careerists, and narcissists—but he had a vast range of social possibilities. He accepted every birthday-party invitation, most dinner-party invitations, and many invitations to go grab a drink. He was … Read more
KYIV, Ukraine — Hundreds of people attended a ceremony Thursday honoring the memory of renowned Ukrainian poet Maksym Kryvtsov, who was killed in action while serving as a soldier in the war Russia started in Ukraine nearly two years ago. A large crowd gathered in the courtyard of Kyiv’s St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, where ceremonies … Read more
What makes a Christmas poem? It could be a drift of snow or some evergreen trees, a box of candy canes or the baby Jesus. The best-known poem attending to the holiday is probably “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” also known as “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” with characters such as quiet mice, clattering reindeer, … Read more
