The complete online text of Two Poets by Honoré de Balzac.

Had Balzac been a less masterful novelist, the disreputably profligate fraud in him might have overwhelmed his artistry. Still, the other Balzac, the artist, is tainted by his well-earned reputation for what has been called artistic license or dishonesty...

The French novelist Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was the first writer to use fiction to convey the total social scene prevailing within one country at a particular period in its history. Commonly regarded as the founder of social realism, he also...

"God bless them, they were so young, with their hair down to their shoulders and carrying all those books.” This wistful observation comes from an aging, drunken, failed poet in The Savage Detectives, the grand novel that made Roberto Bolaño famous in Latin America when...

The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon, by Donald Hall. Houghton Mifflin, 258 pages, $23.Jane Kenyon died in the morning 10 years ago, at three minutes before the 8 o'clock news, with her husband, Donald Hall, beside her, in the long, two-story,...

It was one of my first online dates. We were slogging through the early stages of an awkward conversation over coffee; I confessed that I was new to this process and wasn’t very good at it. “If I ever get good at this,” the guy...