Essays

Catherine Ryan Hyde is the author of 24 published and forthcoming books, including Where We Belong, Walk Me Home, When You Were Older, Don’t Let Me Go, When I Found You, and Second Hand Heart. Forthcoming are Take Me With You, and Pay It Forward: Young Readers Edition.

In the introduction to his excellent history of modern art, George Heard Hamilton observed that:

First, a rant: Every year, the Pulitzer Prize Board announces the nominees and winners in mid-April. The nominees and winners are announced the same day. There is no Nominations Day followed a few weeks or months later by Announcement Day. There is only Announcement Day.

In a surprisingly self-pitying Wall Street Journal editorial, billionaire Charles Koch has put forward the proposition that the n

We will never know what additional marvels might have come from the literary talent of Ross Lockridge, Jr., the Indiana sensation who set out to write the Great American Novel. But an exemplary biography by the author’s second son, Larry Lockridge, comes close to telling us.

In the modern era, conceptual innovators have radically transformed the function and role of style in the arts. Traditionally, style was the artist’s signature or trademark, the unique and distinctive means by which he expressed his ideas or perceptions.

Martin Walker is a senior fellow of a private think tank for CEOs of major corporations. He is also editor-in-chief emeritus and international affairs columnist for UPI, and for many years has been a journalist for the Guardian.

When I was sixteen my father handed me a journal my mother had kept during the nine months she was dying of cancer.  She passed away when I was two years old and the memories I had of her were only images: lying next to her in bed listening to her read a story; putting a Speed Buggy puzzle toget

Fortunately, Derek Walcott didn't study psychology.

To the casual observer, the past three years in Russia have been particularly mystifying — bold protest marches, campaigns calling the Duma majority “crooks and thieves,” the imprisonment of some, but not all, leading dissidents, and gulag time for the outrageous Pussy Riot girls.

“. . . as if language were a kind of moral cloud chamber

through which the world passed and from which

Valentine’s day has passed—and perhaps you forgot.

Love is forever—so here are some ways to powerfully express your love on an ordinary day—and make someone love you—or, if necessary, forgive you.

A few years ago, I was standing in a queue at my bank in Tarrytown, New York, when I heard Russian being spoken behind me. This was not an everyday occurrence. Tarrytown is a suburban Republican enclave of neat lawns and narrow minds.

I first read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, now in its 25-year anniversary edition, in the mid-eighties and I began to breathe again, I began to write to live—and I don’t mean support myself.

Editor's Note: This is a five part series - Please click here for part One.

Editor's Note: This is a five part series - Please click here for part One.