Three-time National Book Award finalist, Lauren Groff is the author of several best-selling novels and short story ...

Blessed are those who have survived long enough to grow into new people, to surpass their past selves.

THIS YEAR, America will mark its semiquincentennial. We will reach 250 years of what is sometimes called “the American Experiment,” the idea that a large constitutional democracy based on individual ...

AFEW YEARS AGO, while living on the Diné Nation, I first heard a striking proclamation that rang through the community with profound urgency: “Tó éí íín´á!”—“water is life.” I saw these words in bold ...

DEEP IN THE FORESTS of the southern coastal plains are places where trees rise up straight out of the ground, sometimes one hundred feet, their branches splayed all near the crown in a wide, high ...

LAKE SUPERIOR ON A CALM DAY has a depth clarity of over a hundred feet. In shallow waters, boulders appear to be just below the surface. Near shore, trash creates a timeline of occupation: plates, ...

To depict a loveless and macabre world—a world of the scarecrow acting as the Lord of blood-thirsty crows, of the harridan decked out as a beauty queen . . . a world of debased flesh and servile ...

HEAT WAVES SHIMMER above the grasses, the air heavy and white and ringing with the buzz of cicadas. The boys have been shoeless all summer long, but even so the dry September stubble of 1895 pricks ...

EARLY IN 2004, a buoy was released into the waters off Argentina. Half of the buoy was dark and the other light, like a planet in relief. The buoy sailed east, accompanied by the vastness of the ocean ...

A CEMETERY SEEMED AN ODD PLACE to contemplate the boundaries of being. Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our cherished slice of nearby nature where the long ...

A CATFISH WITH THREE EYES lived in the Gowanus Canal. I can say this with confidence because I have seen the evidence. The catfish was shiny and pitch-dark. After a fisherman hooked it and reeled it ...