Frost's line, 'I found a dimpled spider... holding up a moth like a white piece of rigid satin cloth' exploits simile. But how can a moth be like cloth? What does likening one material, the fragile, semi-transparent wing of a moth, to a woven fabric, stimulate in the reader's mind.

John Steinbeck's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962

"Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.

Novelist and Finalist for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award Jerome Charyn reads from his new novel, "The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson." Charyn continues his exploration of American history through fiction in this new novel about Emily Dickinson, in her own voice, with all its characteristic modulations that he learned from her letters and poems.

Join Bill Nye and leading NASA scientists as they celebrate 50 years of enthralling solar system exploration, and look forward to what's to come.
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Adam Riess received last year's Nobel Prize in physics for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe, and discusses how this phenomenon is widely attributed to the elusive concept of dark energy.

National Geographic's 2011 Explorer of the Year dives into a perilous submerged cave system known as the Blue Holes of the Bahamas in search of clues to evolution and climate change.

Speleologist Penelope Boston studies bizarre life-forms in the deepest crevices of our home planet to understand what life might look like in harsh, extraterrestrial environments.
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In the search for life beyond Earth, planetary scientist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Kevin Hand looks to the ocean worlds of our solar system, like Jupiter's icy moon, Europa.
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