Finally a biography of John Donne that captures his eccentricities, his contradictions, his fabulous twists and turns, his trickiness, and—as one critic has put it—his thinking “awry and squint.” ...

Perhaps, as John Donne posited, “no man is an island.” But Lourenço, a young Brazilian man stranded on Cape Cod, is giving it a good try. Abandoned by his lover, freezing out his mother and drifting ...

Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deny'st me is; It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be; Thou knowest that this cannot ...

Memorialized in the writings of John Donne and children's songs like "Ring Around the Rosy," the plague seems like a disease of a distant century. Today, there are only a few cases of plague ...

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead. Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pampered, swells with one blood made of two, And this, alas, is more than we would do. Oh stay, three lives in one flea ...