Dylan Thomas

Nostalgia is never more suspect than when the person romantically harking back is too young to have experienced the era firsthand. But reading Patti Smith's memoir "Just Kids," a tender recollection of her coming of age as a singer-songwriter alongside...

Matched A Novel Ally Condie Dutton: 384 pp., $17.99 Imagine a world of perfect efficiency, in which the culture has been culled into lists of best songs and poems and paintings. Today's plethora of technology has been pared to three standard-issue...

The Physics of Imaginary Objects Tina May Hall University of Pittsburgh Press: 160 pp., $24.95 In hard times, as you well know, fewer risks are taken when it comes to potential profit and potential loss. In the publishing world, this means less...

Inspired by Salinger's toilet -- which was listed for sale on EBay for $1 million -- Jacket Copy decided to see what other literary-ish items are currently for sale on the site. What we discovered? The doozy dozen. The first......

The last 12 months are likely to be remembered for their eclectic cultural sweep -- as the year Tiger Woods was sucked into a vortex of groupie hell, Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme came tumbling down and “The Real Housewives of......

We reported Sunday that an internal audit criticized some Orange County Public Schools managers for creating a culture that permitted questionable billing practices. Auditors homed in on a unit within the department that deals with small projects, such as...

Ruth Lilly, a prolific philanthropist who was the last surviving great-grandchild of pharmaceutical magnate Eli Lilly, has died at age 94. A family spokesman said Lilly died Wednesday in Indianapolis. Over the course of her life, the Indianapolis native...

The poetry foundation announced on Monday that it was reconfiguring its social-media engagement, scaling back its blog in favor of Twitter and Facebook. It will turn its blog, Harriet, into a an intermittent, multimedia, poetry-focused online venue,...

Frank Kruppenbacher, the school board's attorney for nearly 3 decades, signs off today.  Woody Rodriguez of Marchena and Graham replaces him. Dick Batchelor, the consultant who helped steer the sales tax initiative to renovate schools, weighs in with...

Janet Fitch is the author of "White Oleander" and "Paint it Black," and she teaches writing at USC. It seems like every time I run into her at a reading, she introduces one or two or more of her students......

She's a sultry big-band singer. He's a poet of growing repute. They were lovers, once. Now, they meet again. It's 1940, there's a war on and he's married. The Edge of Love, now on DVD, is a wartime romance, a love triangle involving the poet Dylan...

The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas died in New York on Nov. 9, 1953, at age 39. Already a celebrity, Thomas was turned into a legend. Did he die as a result of 18 double whiskies drunk neat in the White Horse Tavern? Or was the cause half a grain of morphine...