Nation Topics - Books and the Arts | The Nation

Thanks to the genius of millions, who over the generations have created our language, we may speak of the most uncanny experience in terms that suit the most common.

Tom Waits is an imaginary hobo. He cruises the oddball corners of American pop culture, collecting the deft and moving and loopy short takes he sees and imagines there.

Jay Lovestone is not only one of the oddest characters in the history of the American left but easily its most slippery.

I still kick myself for not having saved the short story I wrote for composition class in seventh grade in which I described how the Russians took over my small suburban community.

I coined the term "global brunch" several years ago after seeing a film of the Stravinsky-Cocteau Oedipus Rex as staged by Julie Taymor.

As I'm driven to the home of Ivan Klima, one of the Czech Republic's most internationally respected writers, the hand of fate slips in beside me in the taxi.

Hark! The squeal of the two-headed amphibian. Mating season must have begun.

From the Satanic Versifier, more love and more death, with a song in his heart.

After we admit that all historical circumstances are specific and all sufferings absolute--that Serbian "police" are not Nazis and ethnic Albanians not Jews (and NATO forces cannot be compared p

Recent French philosophy has been most passionately loved and hated for its militant radicalism.