Books
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.
Marking Time explores how the creation of art in prison can disrupt institutionalized patterns of dehumanization. The book’s larger narrative comes with an overt political aim: “to envision and help create a world without human caging.”
The embrace of existential uncertainty in Cleanness enhances the reading experience because it helps us to understand what’s vitally important to the narrator.
In these poems, contemplation, serenity, and service are the order of the day.
Vanishing Monuments is painstaking, in the literal sense of that compound word: it took enormous pain to make this book. It’s a novel that, for all its organizational strategies, reads with the immediacy of a memoir.
The fifteenth anniversary of the death of a grievously neglected writer whom critics almost universally acclaim a creative genius.
Told from the perspective of the Global South, this novel enthralls as it explores the urgent economic and cultural contradictions of post-colonialism, globalization, class, and alienation.
The “choose your own adventure” turns out not to be a gimmick; setting up alternatives makes Telephone more affecting than Everett’s self-consciously directionless narrative may deserve.
A hundred years ago today one of the most influential writers and editors in American history, William Dean Howells, died in Manhattan at the age of 83.
Children’s Book Feature: Worried about Home Schooling? Relax — and Read
Even though options for parents abound, the very best option remains the simplest — pick up a book, snuggle up, and read.
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