Review
The embrace of existential uncertainty in Cleanness enhances the reading experience because it helps us to understand what’s vitally important to the narrator.
Read More
On her solo debut, the former Paramore lead singer undergoes a startling transformation.
Read More
A review of the 60th anniversary reissue of Frank Sinatra’s album Nice ‘n’ Easy. Though not without a few rounds with the Sinatra mythology — not the complicated man, but his music.
Read More
Circus of Books is a hilarious film about a gay porn book store and its owners, “heartwarming” even, and it’s all true.
Read More
The interpretations of the covers in this beautifully realized tribute album will bring back memories of the originals in a way that is enlivening rather than nostalgic.
Read More
In The Great, Tony McNamara proves that period pieces that pit conniving yet sympathetic women against tyrannical men can make for a kind of refreshingly cathartic entertainment.
Read More
In these poems, contemplation, serenity, and service are the order of the day.
Read More
Up From the Streets is no New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival — but it tries.
Read More
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.
Read More
Musical theater giant Stephen Sondheim turned 90 on March 22, and Stevie Wonder—for my money, the greatest popular music composer of the last 60 years—turned 70 on May 13.
Read More
Arts Feature: Best Movies (With Some Disappointments) of 2025