Nation Topics - Books and the Arts | The Nation

Robert Bresson’s The Devil, Probably; Maurice Pilat’s Police; Leo McCary’s My Son John.

How the work of a literary critic became the proxy for our preoccupation with the horrors of torture.

A Russian novelist’s fight, in life and art, to see the world afresh in all its cruelty and splendor.

Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger’s Jews and Words.

Judith Long on Jane Sharples, Allison Kilkenny on the fight for Philly’s schools

The film’s torture scenes do not excuse or glorify torture; they do something worse: draw the audience into accommodating it.

In his writing and life, Thomas Bernhard led a charge in the opposite direction. His publisher always broke his fall.