If you love fiction you should devote several hours to watching Hemingway. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have brought a special tenderness to this series, something deeper and more compelling than previous Burns documentaries.
Book Review: Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt” — Closing the Circle, Perfectly
This is a great work, more linear than Tom Stoppard’s earlier dramas, yet filled with such intelligence and compassion that it will be read and seen for years and years and, perhaps, over time be regarded as his richest, most haunting play.
Book Review: “Renato!” — Novelist Eugene Mirabelli, Creator of Inwardness
What a pleasure it is to revel in this work, which expresses enduring values in such an original way.
Book Review: Colum McCann’s “Apeirogon” — Showing a Path Forward
Although some of Apeirogon is painful, this novel can inspire you to think differently and even to act, which is surely welcome after this horrible year in which we have all felt so helpless.
Book Review: A Brilliant “Homeland Elegies” — Indispensable Witness
What Ayad Akhtar reveals, with stunning detail and a passion and an urgency rarely seen in American fiction, is that his is a story marked by a loneliness similar to that found in Melville, Dreiser, and T.S. Eliot, among others, and that puts him squarely in their company.
Literary Appreciation: D. H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love” at 100
I hope this centennial will inspire readers to immerse themselves in this enormously important, rich, and vibrant work.
Book Review: A.B. Yehoshua’s “The Tunnel” — A Serious Romp about an Aging Brain
Exuberant is the right word for A.B. Yehoshua’s new novel, not only because of the story’s pile up of characters and events, but also for its prose.
Book Review: “Invisible Years” — A Book for the Ages
Invisible Years is — simultaneously — an indispensable source and a distinguished work of art.
Book Review: “Immigrant Architect — Rafael Guastavino and the American Dream,” a Splendid Book about Design for all Ages
A book to cheer you in these challenging times, providing destinations to explore when this pandemic is over, and a story to inspire the more inventive young among us.
Book Review: Art Critic Peter Schjeldahl — Connecting Readers to the World in a New Way
Good essays about art help us learn to see. Wonderful essays about the artists in our lives — which means all the artists through history, because, as Peter Schjeldahl so eloquently puts it, “all art is contemporary” —- help us learn how to live.