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.
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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.”
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The embrace of existential uncertainty in Cleanness enhances the reading experience because it helps us to understand what’s vitally important to the narrator.
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In these poems, contemplation, serenity, and service are the order of the day.
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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.
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The fifteenth anniversary of the death of a grievously neglected writer whom critics almost universally acclaim a creative genius.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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