Bookforum praises McCrae’s work as “cool, easygoing, and deep” and deems him “one of our most necessary poets.”

In The Guardian, Yiyun Li and Jon McGregor on the brilliant and quiet strangeness of Tom Drury's small-town America.

In The Paris Review, Lena Dunham’s new introduction to The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr explores the memoir’s effects 20 years later and how Karr has made truth-telling an art.

A new poem by Corral on Poets.org explores the concept of prayer.

In Playbill, Sarah Ruhl on the obsession with the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell that inspired her new play, Dear Elizabeth.

On NPR, Michael Cunningham on the disappointing childhood bedtime stories that inspired his new collection of reimagined fairy tales, A Wild Swan.

In The Paris Review, Rowan Ricardo Phillips begins his new basketball column with the question “How did I get here?”

In The Brooklyn Rail, writer Diksha Basu on why Kent Haruf’s Our Souls At Night leaves one with “the feeling of life.”

In Guernica, on the anniversary of Lou Reed's death, Trachtenberg reflects on Reed’s famous drawl and his ability to make people feel deeply.

In The New Yorker, Meis deciphers the ways Robert Harbison’s “delightfully out-of-control sentences” reflect a love of ancient ruins and an understanding of humanity.