Nation Topics - Books and the Arts | The Nation

In the early 1920s, E.M.

"I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided," said Sam Shepard, explaining his motivation for writing True West. "It's a real thing, double nature.

In the role of New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell--source and subject alike of Joe Gould's Secret--Stanley Tucci adopts the hesitant drawl of a displaced Southern aristocrat, who goe

Pakistan today is a complete mess, a sad example of what can happen when a once-favored "frontline state" is reduced to the status of a cold war orphan.

While the public has been napping, the American university has been busily reinventing itself.

Tilman Riemenschneider

If you squint long enough at Claire Denis's amazing Beau Travail--you'll have to squint, given the African sunlight--you will make out the faint contour of a story.

To her biographer, Simone de Beauvoir confided a less than rhapsodic one-night stand, in 1946, with the Hungarian malcontent Arthur Koestler: "One night I got so drunk I let him come home with me

Star vehicle?

After last year's brouhaha surrounding the presentation by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of a Lifetime Achievement Award to Elia Kazan, one member of the academy had an idea.