Books
In some ways, Jonathan Jones’ narrative structure works against his strengths. Highly respected as a critic, he is an energetic and engaging writer and excels at what art historians call “close looking,” where he guides the reader line by line, brush stroke by brush stroke, through a work of art.
Read MoreUltimately, “The Elimination” is less a literary effort than an act of witness by both writer and reader.
Read MoreAutobiography, personal essay, history, current affairs, or literary criticism, many are the guises under which travel writing has seduced readers of decidedly categorical bent.
Read More“The Beginning-End of Yiddish,” is poet/essayist Richard Fein’s core subject: his love for a language largely eviscerated in his lifetime.
Read MoreAmerican readers will be intrigued by a language for sexuality that is plain but understated, neither vulgar nor coy.
Read MoreThis is not just a story of a plucky girl succeeding; in weaving her complicated story and giving credit to those who helped her to understand how to think critically and how to develop her own moral philosophy, Sonia Sotomayor never forgets that luck and serendipity also play a part.
Read MoreUnlike fellow apostate (and friend) Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne didn’t have the chutzpah to be a proto-existentialist — for him, it was better to cling to questionable moral pieties than plummet into sheer nothingness.
Read MorePeter Hook’s memoir contains no earthshattering revelations, but it does offer a new way (or at least another way) of thinking about the four young men who made up Joy Division.
Read MorePoems of concise and precise description and philosophy find their way among poems of memory and daily life, money, art, love, and the oddities in giving names. J. Kates’s technique is alive and various throughout.
Read MoreRobert Ingersoll is all but unknown in our time. Susan Jacoby sets out to answer why. One answer she proposes is that it was generally assumed that the reactionary expressions of religion Ingersoll contended against would simply fade away over time, to be replaced by education, broader culture and scientific reason.
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