Books & the Arts

What Are They Reading? What Are They Reading?

"Birds of America," by Lorrie Moore

May 25, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Shayna Cohen

Medium Cool Medium Cool

In the film from which there is no escape and no going back, The Matrix, the writer-director team of Andy and Larry Wachowski presented a grim choice between truth and illusion...

May 22, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

Fight Club Fight Club

Writing may be fighting, as Ishmael Reed famously opined, but most writers know the difference. There are, of course, some who blur the line.

May 22, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Adam Shatz

She’s So Heavy She’s So Heavy

In 1981 Carolyn Forché published a slim collection of verse, her second, titled The Country Between Us.

May 22, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Meghan O’Rourke

Sex and the City Sex and the City

From the mid to the late 1920s, the German painter Christian Schad produced a group of paintings like little else in modern art.

May 22, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

Magnificent Obsessions Magnificent Obsessions

This week, all true movie lovers will rush to see a violent and fantastic special-effects thriller, in which a character endowed with uncanny powers rips through the veil of il...

May 15, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

The Misuses of Allegory The Misuses of Allegory

Is José Saramago an anti-Semite?

May 15, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans

The New Yorker Goes to War The New Yorker Goes to War

In its first issue after the fall of the World Trade Center, The New Yorker published a handful of short reaction pieces by John Updike, Jonathan Franzen and others about the h...

May 15, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Lazare

Dare Call It Treason Dare Call It Treason

Few traditions are more American than freedom of speech and the right to dissent.

May 15, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Eric Foner

We Are the Patriots We Are the Patriots

Americans who oppose the Cheney-Bush junta demonstrate sanity, not cowardice.

May 15, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Gore Vidal

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