Rembrandt’s Year Rembrandt’s Year
2006 marks Rembrandt's 400th birthday, and an array of exhibitions, from the sublime to the silly, will open in Amsterdam, Washington and beyond. As the aesthetic hype escalate...
Dec 19, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Abigail R. Esman
East Fifth Street: A Poster for the Oresteia East Fifth Street: A Poster for the Oresteia
Pasted bumpily on brick, life-sized. Inside, in a former foundry's casting vault, my father in the role of Agamemnon died. A thin-browed bronze mask skating
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Anne Winters
The Displaced of Capital The Displaced of Capital
"A shift in the structure of experience..." As I pass down Broadway this misty late-winter morning, the city is ever alluring, but thousands of miles to the south
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Anne Winters
MacDougal Street: Old-Law Tenements MacDougal Street: Old-Law Tenements
We're aware in every nerve end of our tenement's hand-mortared Jersey brick, the plumbing's dripping dew-points, the electric running Direct, and on each landing four hall-johns fitted to the specifics and minima of the 1879 Tenement Housing Act. We lived in its clauses and parentheses, that drew up steep stairways and filled the brown airwells with eyebrowed windows. Unwhistling, the midwinter radiator lists in its pool of rust. A lightcord winds through its light chain; from a plasterless ceiling-slat topples a roach, with its shadow. Downstairs, our Sicilian widow beats the cold ribs with a long-handled skillet, and faucets drum in twenty old-law flats.
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Anne Winters
2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize 2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Anne Winters's The Displaced of Capital, winner of the 2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, is a reflective, documentary and visionary volume of poetry inspired by the city of New Yo...
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Robert Pinsky
Farewell to the Working Class Farewell to the Working Class
Two new books on indolence, How To Be Idle and Bonjour Laziness, issue low-energy cries for political apathy, a shorter work week and the fine art of slacking off.
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Austin Kelley
The Oceanic Feeling The Oceanic Feeling
John Banville's latest novel, The Sea, winner of the Man Booker Prize, is a painstaking narrative of memory, grief and many losses, remarkable for what it richly conveys about what...
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Claire Messud
Middlemarch Middlemarch
The GOP is an object of popular loathing, yet prospects seem dim for ousting it from power. Three new books explain why: Off Center explores the GOP's genius for subverting the mec...
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Eyal Press
Gene McCarthy Gene McCarthy
Eugene McCarthy was a pure original, a great and good man, whose fundamental historical achievement was to be the standard-bearer for a moral and philosophical campaign against the...
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / George McGovern
Fear and Laughing in Las Vegas Fear and Laughing in Las Vegas
Lenny Bruce was a lone voice at a time when irreverent comedy could land him in jail on obscenity charges. But the spirit of Lenny Bruce hovered over the first annual Comedy Festiv...
Dec 15, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Paul Krassner