As distinctions between traditional and avant-garde, central and marginal dissolve, poet and critic Stephanie Burt discusses some of America’s most exciting contemporary poets, who are speaking to and from diverse experiences and backgrounds – sometimes with a disco beat

Paris in the 1920s was a creative melting pot, the haunt of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce. The Yale English professor gives us a feel for what it was like to be there

F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, set during a hedonistic zenith before the Great Depression, has fresh appeal today as we face down our own crisis, says the professor of American literature

Novelist Jonathan Evison recommends books that capture a sense of the rugged landscape and people of the American West.

Modern America is a story of expanding frontiers, says the bestselling author. He tells us about five novels that shed light on the social history of his adopted homeland, from the late 19th century to the Great Depression