Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters, 1885, oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam To write an apologia, to lay blame on Theo, and to...

Cropped Image of Saint Jerome Writing by Caravaggio With the final sentence of Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay , “the birth of the reader must...

A photo of Tawes Hall, where UMD’s own Writing Center is located Would you rather a human or a computer give you one-on-one writing...

Ancient recipes from cuneiform tablets (Yale Babylonian Collection) Hungry? Well, let me pull out the recipe book. It’s only 4 millennia...

A variant cover of Alissa Nutting’s Tampa (Amazon). Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 classic Lolita is perhaps one of the most controversial works...

Art illustration by Zariah Taylor depicting the many mispronunciations of her name Hello! How are you? My name is… A classic way to meet...

President Trump speaking at 2018 Helsinki Summit with President Puti (Smialowski /Getty) In about a month, AP projections will transition...

‘Man with No Name’ from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly   Two figures stand at the forefront of the Western novel: the...

The Fall of Adam and Eve, the biblical first parents of mankind Among the great forces which have dethroned tyrants, few stand so...

Representational Image of Brain Rot (Dhakatribune) “Books do furnish a room.” A quote from Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One’s Own ....

A scene from Divergent (2014 ) where Tris breaks the rules to look at herself in the mirror Divergent (2011) by Veronica Roth plays...

A photo-edited portrait of William Shakespeare (University of Indianapolis) Are people actually creative anymore? Are we all just...

A cropped image from the cover of Yellowface by R. F. Kuang “And f—k it, I’ll just say it: taking Athena’s manuscript felt like...

Metaphor of stacked books chained to resemble the term “banned books”   Books offer readers the opportunity to explore and better...

A graphic indicating the danger of anti-intellectualism online To many Americans, reading is a simple fact of life. We read road signs,...

A Chinese-English sign in Beijing, China (Wikimedia Commons). The author clarifies their use of “standard English” as “the most...

Leah Sava Jeffries’ portrayal of Annabeth Chase in Disney+’s  Percy Jackson and the Olympians Reading is imagination at play. Readers...

Image : The Idiot  cover Fyodor Dosteyevsky  didn’t define idiot  the way that we do. An idiot isn’t someone without common sense. It’s...

Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1342 - 1400 If the name of Geoffrey Chaucer is not well known among today’s young readers, it deserves to be. His...

Art Inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray “I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have...