Books
This is a grim and uncomfortable book to read because it forces us to contemplate each small poem separately and then take them all together, a hard but necessary exercise.
“It’s easy to see why we have such a lousy life and such great literature.”
Charlie’s Good Tonight does a fine job of illuminating Charlie Watts’ personality and paying homage to the drummer’s admirable legacy.
Underlying all of these pieces is the sensibility of the émigrée, the person who has had to reinterpret everything in her life.
A funny, bittersweet novel by British writer Jonathan Coe portrays the great American film director Billy Wilder on the downside of his career
Deeply indebted to her relationship to persons and places, José-Flore Tappy uses poetry as a way to revisit them, honoring the absent through poems co-created by memory and imagination.
Many Thanksgiving myths are dispelled, but the effort to reverse decades of misinformation leads to oversimplification at times.
In A Fan’s Life, Paul Campos makes a valiant stab at reconciling his avowedly progressive views on American politics and iconoclastic intellectual pursuits with his lifelong obsession with spectator sports.
The Idea of Prison Abolition is a worthwhile book, but Dr. Shelby’s case, philosophically strong as it might be, is not very likely to convince prison abolitionists.
Arts Commentary: Annie Ernaux, Abortion, and Me
What is literature if it doesn’t kick you in the ass every now and then and get you to act? Maybe that’s what the Nobel committee thought when it awarded Annie Ernaux this year’s Literature Prize.
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