Dread and Wonder Dread and Wonder
The unflinching fiction of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.
Mar 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / William Deresiewicz
I, Diet I, Diet
out of this world & out of time & out of love & out of mind & out of the pan & out of butter, out of anger & out of mother, out of the cradle & out of pocket, out of space & out of cash & out of change & out of sight & out of range & force of habit & out of oil & out of whack & out of water & Damascus, out of courtesy & out of shock & out of duty & out of turn & out of tune & out of line & out of the ground & out of his gourd & out of all the possible solutions, out of the ashes & conviction
Mar 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Anna Maria Hong
Against the Grain Against the Grain
Elizabeth Fenn, the Mandans and a renaissance in historical writing.
Mar 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Richard White
Ball of Fire Ball of Fire
The life and unvarnished style of Barbara Stanwyck.
Mar 4, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Charles Taylor
Whistler’s Battles Whistler’s Battles
Ambitious beneath his pose of indolence, James McNeill Whistler was the most contradictory of artists.
Feb 19, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Barry Schwabsky
Big MoMA’s House Big MoMA’s House
MoMA’s new expansion plans represent avant-gardism at its most deracinated.
Feb 19, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Michael Sorkin
From & Friends From & Friends
Failing upward at the Democratic Leadership Council with Al From.
Feb 11, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Rick Perlstein
Water and Soil, Grain and Flesh Water and Soil, Grain and Flesh
Walter Johnson reconsiders the connection between slavery and capitalism.
Feb 11, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Robin Einhorn
Autumn Journal Autumn Journal
Gingerly the moon moves near the hilltop church and slides around the transept, slow, to peer inside the cloister. No: those are not friars there, but children… outside their nests. She rests against a brim of wind. Their wings are hurt… But lying in ordered rows of narrow beds they’re all asleep, as if they’re tired. Tired from flying, at least in dreams, and so in dreams their mothers hold them close against warm skin. The moon, she listens in. She doesn’t want to wake them, she only wants to see. And then she leaves, but rises high. She needs to make the hilltops gleam, and drape a sheen across the sea, but too she sends a beam back down to where the children sleep. And up she climbs, up through the sky, the high good sky, and searches far and wide to find the stars. Where are the stars? She scans the sky. Where can they be? She wants to tell the faultless virgin stars what she has seen. (translated from the Italian by Taije Silverman and Marina Della Putta Johnston)
Feb 11, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Giovanni Pascoli