The Tower of Babel The Tower of Babel
Jerome Charyn's Savage Shorthand: The Life and Death of Isaac Babel examines the life the revolutionary idealist murdered by Stalin in 1940 and explodes the literary myths that hav...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Lee Siegel
The Dying Animal The Dying Animal
Gabriel García Márquez's new novella begins as an autobiography, but the passion-filled story of an old man, mad with love and clinging to life, weaves Marquez's othe...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Michael Wood
Mystic River Mystic River
Amartya Sen's latest collection of essays explores the rich flow of various peoples in and out of India and how they shaped the politics and spirituality of the nation today.
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Tariq Ali
All About My Mother All About My Mother
The Caribbean island of Vieques is a fitting setting for Captain of the Sleepers, Cuban novelist Mayra Montero's engrossing story premised on violations of the dead.
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Kate Levin
Profane Illuminations Profane Illuminations
New biographies of Rousseau and Voltaire help us appreciate how very fragile the eighteenth century's great movement of ideas was, and how remarkable it is that the Enlightenment n...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / David A. Bell
Don’t Criticize Me Don’t Criticize Me
Karl Rove and his Singing Slimemeisters riff You Go To My Head.
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Calvin Trillin
Emile Capouya Emile Capouya
Emile Capouya, literary editor of The Nation from 1970-1976, was both a working man and an intellectual, who brought trade book publishing to European standards and lived to oppose...
Nov 17, 2005 / Editorial / Ted Solotaroff
In Kars and Frankfurt In Kars and Frankfurt
The winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature wrote this 2005 editorial in The Nation, addressing the issue of the artistic imagination at risk in a repressive state.
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Orhan Pamuk
Agee’s Gospel Agee’s Gospel
Two new volumes in the Library of America series present the life and work of James Agee, whose flashes of greatness as an essayist, screenwriter, novelist and Nation film reviewe...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Phillip Lopate
The Scrivener and the Whale The Scrivener and the Whale
Andrew Delbanco's new biography of Herman Melville reveals that the great writer came to realize that what torments men is not the longing to believe that there is meaning in the u...
Nov 17, 2005 / Books & the Arts / Vivian Gornick