Indholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2025 i The American Scholar

Here in the mid-Atlantic, autumn is the peak season for wild-mushroom enthusiasts. Yes, springtime brings morels, and summer is the moment for golden chanterelles, but fall is when the mushroom vendor at our farmers market sells the widest range of foraged treasures: matsutake, lobster, chicken-of-the-woods, cauliflower, black trumpet, and, on the rare occasion, porcini. I’m crazy about them all, and I’ll roast them, sauté them, pickle them, feature them in soups, pastas, omelets, and risottos. Not long ago, I even elevated a humble chicken casserole by using lobster mushrooms along with a cream-of-mushroom soup base made with matsutakes. Overkill? Almost certainly. By the time I turned to the proofs of Michael Autrey’s essay in this issue—about the serious business of mushroom foraging— I had pretty much cycled through my repertoire…

The dream is this. A perfectly ordinary woman I work with tells me she is an alien. She tells me this because we are friends. She puts a black rubber patch over the left side of my face that, she says, will retrain my brain, let me understand her language, which is too strange to learn using Duolingo. She asks me to take a nap. I do and when I wake (in the dream), the first thing I notice is that I stink. Humans stink. I wake up (for real) gagging. The point of the dream, I decide over breakfast, is that a new language is more than just different words for the same things we’ve known all our lives. Each language is a world where we see—smell—differently. I find…

SAMANTHA ROSE HILL is the author of Hannah Arendt and co-editor of What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt. She is currently at work on a book about loneliness. The passages from The Magic Mountain quoted in this essay are from John E. Woods’s translation of the novel. There is only one way to reach the Berghotel Schatzalp, in Davos-Platz in the Swiss canton of Graubünden. You must switch trains at Landquart, a small municipality in the Alps, where you stand on an open-air platform in the wind without even the consolation of a view. From there, the train follows the Landquart River, leaving behind the villages and castles nestled in the valley, before beginning to ascend 3,907 feet up into the mountains, squeezing between sheets of rock and…

MICHAEL AUTREY, an essayist and a poet, is the author of Our Fear, a collection of poems. His work has appeared in Asymptote, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Chicago Review, Essays in Criticism, The Hopkins Review, and Raritan, among other publications, and is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review. To forage is to look for things that aren’t lost. Birding, mushrooming, hunting agates in the wet sand at ebb tide or arrowheads in the sagebrush along the edge of a dry playa—everything I’ve spent time seeking has been right where it belonged, indifferent to whether it was found. If I failed to see birds when I could hear them or gather mushrooms when I could smell them, I considered it a failure to live in the right relation to my senses. The most…

(SUMMER 2008) The people of the island built those amazing stone statues, and in the process cut down every last tree. No trees, no wood for houses and fires; no protection from erosion; no useful species, and so on. —Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle It worked without a hitch: the last big head rolled down the last logs to its niche. As planned, a long chorus of monoliths had replaced the forest, staring seaward, nicely spaced, each with a generous collar of greensward, and prepared to stand so long that it would be a good trade: life, for the thing made.…

(WINTER 2023) You have to first Sit in the temple gloom In the mahogany chair & despair. The only glimmer In the temple (being the inlaid bits of The Mother- Of-Pearl shells On the tall, more than humanly tall Chair back, for these These too Are the reputed “Tears of Things” Of this world as seen By the world. In that other chair behind Temple curtains Sits Mother Mother Who believed For a good part of her later life You were there somewhere In the temple Writing A book About her. She could hear you In prose Telling tales. Mother had an interesting life Because she was beautiful & she wrote poetry & poetry ruins lives. (Does this sound like a fatwa, Girls? “May your life be messy, Your poems…

JANNA MALAMUD Smith’s fifth book, When the Island Had Fish: The Remarkable Story of a Maine Fishing Community, was published in 2023. Those who generalize about the human condition often find their truths overturned by the obstinate individualism of reality. —Julian Barnes In the 1840s, on dark, foggy evenings on Baker’s Island, Maine, the kind of night when you could scarcely see, brothers Elisha and Joseph Gilley would leave their houses and walk to the water’s edge. There they would set about the work of faking shipwrecks on the island’s rocky ledge. The historical record offers scant detail, but somehow, likely using torches or lanterns to signal, the brothers would guide vessels toward the shore until they foundered and came to grief. Once the crews—complicitous in the scheme—were rescued, the…

MEGAN CRAIG is an artist and an associate professor of philosophy and art at Stony Brook University. How does one become a stone? Begin by sitting still. Let the world go on around you. Don’t move. Don’t cry. Write a bit, but do not speak. Sit out in the rain. Get cold. Warm up in the sun. Hum, but don’t sing. Let someone lean against you or sit on top of you. Bask. Don’t move. When she was a toddler, my younger daughter, Violet, liked to play a game. She would make herself into a small ball on my bed and try to be perfectly still. “Pretend I’m a rock!” she’d command. I would do as told and pretend not to notice her. Eventually I would lay my head on…

Americans used to train for aging and mortality. Mary Moody Emerson of Concord, Massachusetts, practiced death for decades, wearing her burial shroud by day, then climbing into a coffin-shaped bed. Her nephew Ralph Waldo opened tombs to watch decay conquer the bodies he loved: his young first wife, his five-year-old son. In family plots everywhere, gravestones cautioned: As I am now, so you must be. Contemporary America segregates debility and death, and it’s costing us, body and soul, writes Duke University historian James Chappel. We all go into the dark, but too many of us suffer dreadfully in the process. The arc of modernity, Chappel contends, can be read as a struggle between insecurity and security—as material reality, as subjective state. We crave security for ourselves but not necessarily for…

What is art? What is music? Are they intrinsically human endeavors or can they be made by—not just with—machines? In The Uncanny Muse, his eighth book, David Hajdu traces a lineage of automated creative productions to answer centuries-old questions that have been thrust to the forefront once again with the recent explosion of artificial intelligence. A music critic for The Nation and a professor of journalism at Columbia, Hajdu is well positioned to ponder the philosophical stakes of algorithm-driven art, though the teacher in me wonders whether he is as tolerant of his students’ writing articles with ChatGPT as he is of the gamemaker who won the 2022 Colorado Art Fair with a work produced by the AI technology Midjourney. (I’m not.) The title of Hajdu’s book borrows from the…

The spasm of terror that shook France nearly a decade ago began with the attack on the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, leaving a dozen dead, and subsided 18 months later, after the slaughter of 86 people on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. But the most devastating massacre, exceeding the others in its logistical sophistication and lethality, came in between. On Friday, November 13, 2015, as they enjoyed a football match, a dinner out with friends, and a rock concert, 130 people died at the hands of a radicalized jihadist “commando.” Emmanuel Carrère’s V13 (short for vendredi treize, Friday the 13th) is an earnest effort to bring sequence, context, motive, and some kind of moral clarity to that horrifying night in Paris. The…

The challenge for the composer of operas today is to find a collaborator with the skills necessary to create a compelling libretto. Two hundred years ago, there were poets who specialized in writing theatrical verse, especially for the prestigious medium of opera. Today, there is no living literary tradition of writing libretti. Nor is there much expertise among managers of opera companies in evaluating texts beyond checking that they deliver the bare theatrical essentials. The questions a composer asks today would never have occurred to Giuseppe Verdi or Richard Wagner. Should the libretto be in prose or verse? Is poetry still the right medium for opera? Wouldn’t prose be a more direct and natural medium? What sort of writer brings more to the project—the poet or the playwright? Poets of…

Twenty years ago, Robert Wilson, then the editor of The American Scholar, invited me to join the magazine as poetry editor. With Sandra Costich, the assistant poetry editor then and now, we developed a new section. The idea was to feature a single poet, whose work I would introduce with a short essay. By now we’ve presented more than 70 poets in this way, a few of whom have made repeat appearances. The roster includes some of the leading English-language poets of the past 50 years as well as a few first-book authors. To celebrate them all, we’ve chosen eight poems to reprint. Driving around town, I often notice a bumper sticker for our local alternative radio station. The station has a wonderfully deadpan slogan: “Some songs I like /…

(AUTUMN 2011) I want to get out of myself and what I’ve written, Yet I wear each moment like a hat. The brim, The feather stuck in the hatband—what do they mean? What kind of metaphor is that? What kind of hat? I remember an essay I wrote in Luther League About the soul’s journey toward salvation: like a rocket, I said (it was just after Sputnik), a three-stage rocket Fueled by discipline and faith (the hydrogen and oxygen) That roars inexorably aloft until the third stage fires And the satellite separates and the soul settles into its orbit Around God, emitting little beeps of praise. “Analogies,” Said Pastor Paul, “are fine, but never take one to its logical conclusion.” Who needs an MFA when you have Pastor Paul? I…

(SUMMER 2009) There must have been huge oaks and pines, cedars, maybe madrone, in Tuscany and Umbria long ago. A few centuries after wood was gone, they began to build with brick and stone. Brick and stone farmhouses, solid, fireproof, steel shutters and doors. But farming changed. Sixty thousand vacant solid fireproof Italian farm houses on the market in 1970, scattered across the land. Sixty thousand affluent foreigners, to fix them, learn to cook, and write a book. But in California, houses all are wood— roads pushed through, sewers dug, lines laid underground— hundreds of thousands, made of strandboard, sheetrock, plaster— They won’t be here two hundred years from now—they’ll burn or rot. No handsome solid second homes for Thousand-year later wealthy Melanesian or Eskimo artists and writers here, —oak…

ELIZABETH DENTON is the author of Kneeling on Rice: Stories. Her short fiction has appeared in The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Blackbird, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other literary magazines. She taught creative writing at the University of Virginia for many years. She lives in Batesville, Virginia. From the day Laurie arrived at the small liberal arts college, a freshman from Evanston, Illinois, she’d been hearing about the Magic Men. This upstate New York school, with its sandstone buildings and glass-domed gymnasium, seemed dull so far: paleskinned blondes wherever you looked, no different from the people Laurie had gone to high school with. Week two, things started to look up. In her drama class, Laurie had been paired with a junior named Helen, and after their…

In a 13 BCE contract, a Persian woman named Didyma agreed to “nurse and suckle … with her own milk pure and untainted” a foundling owned by a rich woman. Didyma promised not to “injure her milk nor sleep with a man nor become pregnant nor suckle another child,” or else pay 500 drachmas in damages—an amount 50 times her monthly wages. Lest we think this a quirk of the ancient world, a 1664 Italian medical treatise says that “congress with a man spoils the milk.” Thus hiring a wet nurse could become an arrangement in which “a rich man paid a poor man not to have sex with his own wife, so that the rich man could continue his unlimited access to his own marriage bed.” So writes classical…

Dacher Keltner, founder of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, has spent quite a bit of time studying the feeling of awe—specifically, under what circumstances humans experience it. His findings are surprising. After talking to thousands of people from 20 language groups across the globe, Keltner discovered that what most inspires us to feel awe is not nature or music or existential questions. It’s not Mount Everest or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or contemplating the meaning of life. Rather, it’s the selfless and courageous acts of fellow humans, their heroic deeds or ability to overcome setbacks, that we cannot get enough of. These are the things that bring us to our knees. It’s interesting to note that feeling awe can produce a physical response on our…

Facts first. We live in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. We live here because I have a job as a professor at the university. I teach creative writing. My husband had a visiting position—he taught world literature and composition—but because of Covid, his job wasn’t renewed in 2020, and we weren’t sure whether it would be available again. So my husband thought on what he wanted to do. It turns out working as an EMT on an ambulance was what. Later, he would become a paramedic. But emergency medical technician comes first, and for his EMT course, my husband’s teacher was a woman I’ll call Annie. He took the course at the community college. The course cost $1,000. Annie is in her late 50s. She’s been a paramedic in southern Mississippi for almost…

(WINTER 2014) At last the night surrounded me; I floated on it, perhaps in it, or it carried me as a river carries a boat, and at the same time it swirled above me, star-studded but dark nevertheless. These were the moments I lived for. I was, I felt, mysteriously lifted above the world so that action was at last impossible which made thought not only possible but limitless. It had no end. I did not, I felt, need to do anything. Everything would be done for me, or done to me, and if it was not done, it was not essential. I was on my balcony. In my right hand I held a glass of Scotch in which two ice cubes were melting. Silence had entered me. It was…

(SUMMER 2022) I have uncovered evidence your broken secret heart holds a hairline fracture held together by kite string Carol Burnett is heralded in a criminally low number of imaginations The leaves in the fall burn a copper like fire in a storm of applause around a laugh strange as the rules of grammar Ladies & Gentlemen put your hands together for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s beautifully iambic name Do not think of all the tall in him squeezing into a stall at the mall as strange Some days his father whispered to himself Someday that boy’s going to change his name I ran away from home as soon as I had a chance when I was four or five in the Carolinas Certain words never used to cross my mind A…

(SUMMER 2016) We wander round ring after ring of life, One after another, blossoms of light To which we’re but a mere flotsam of bees. And although this isn’t true, the poem says This is true; life, light, flowers and bee: truths. So stop and hold this poem above your head. Hold it up to whatever light you find. Then let it go: forget it if you can. If it is meant to remain, it will remain. And if it is meant to light, it will light. Your hands will have moved on to something else But your head will have, say it, its halo.…

ILAN STAVANS is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. This essay is adapted from the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook to the Dictionary. His next book is Conversations on Dictionaries. "The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.” So wrote Italo Calvino in The Uses of Literature (1980), and he was right. Literature is what happens after words find their rightful place on the page. But the quote fails to acknowledge that dictionaries are narratives, too. They may lack an obvious plotline and may even seem disjointed—these lists of…

In the decades between George Washington’s first presidential inauguration and Abraham Lincoln’s, nearly 50,000 church structures sprang up in the young nation, “sacralizing the landscape,” as the Welsh historian Richard Carwardine writes in this deeply researched new study. Religion had played an active role in American life since the Puritans, but its explosive growth in the first half of the 19th century, especially among evangelicals, resulted in most Americans’ believing that divine providence was operating not only in their daily lives but also in the direction of their exceptionalist country. The First Amendment outlawed the establishment of a national religion, but the founders “left room for the civic role of Christian ideas and values,” Carwardine writes. The preachers at the pulpits in those many new houses of worship, as well…

Forty years ago, most white Americans had no idea that, hard on the heels of the American and French revolutions, an enslaved population on a Caribbean island had claimed its freedom by force of arms and founded a new Black nation called Haiti. Today, Haitian revolutionary studies is an overcrowded field. Researchers have combed through acres of hard-to-find and often drastically disorganized archives, not only in Haiti and France but also in other European and Caribbean countries, and made their contents a lot more orderly and accessible than they used to be. Still, reconstructing the profile of even a fairly well-known individual from the revolutionary period can be something like deducing a whole dinosaur from a couple of toenails and teeth—a problem that confronts Marlene Daut in the writing of…

One night in October 1952, an electrician named Frank Walsh crept down the stairs of his Long Island home, drew his gun, and blasted a hole in his family’s television. His wife and kids had been watching with the volume too high, keeping him awake, and he’d had enough. His wife called the police, but the cops declined to arrest him: it wasn’t illegal to shoot your own TV. A cheeky newspaper story (headline: “Obviously Self-Defense”) brought the story to the public, and Walsh became a minor celebrity. He even appeared on a television game show where, naturally, he won a new set. Social critic Nicholas Carr relates this anecdote in his eye-opening new book, Superbloom. To Carr, it perfectly captures the absurdity of mass media. Rather than inspiring reflection,…

“What we all dread most,” said the priest in a low voice, “is a maze with no centre.” —G. K. Chesterton, “The Head of Caesar,” 1914 I’m alive in this moment when the sun is dying, or when climate change is destroying the planet, so many years from the big bang. So also with the body. I have a tendency to fat. Okay, that’s my situation. —Fredric Jameson, The Years of Theory, 2024 I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there…