Articles in Arts & Life
Loud, Loud, Loud: AUDUBON!!!!
He travelled the fledgling United States shooting birds, wiring them into poses, and then painting them for eternity – he was John James Audubon, and his epic “The Birds of America” has a beautiful, gargantuan new edition from Abbeville Press
Razing Hell
In a new memoir packed with garbled madness, we get a funhouse-mirror autobiography of the legendary Richard Hell, who did more than anybody to invent punk rock and only haphazardly survived to tell the tale
No Kaddish For Old Men
Does love create an unbridgeable distance between two souls? Marco Roth’s searching memoir of his microbiologist father alternates between longing and numbness in its search for what, if anything, binds fathers and sons
Sleazy Inner Tubes
Artist Laura Carton does not surf pornography for the usual reasons, By digitally removing the ‘actors’ from their backgrounds, she creates strangely suggestive landscapes. In this interview she addresses both her process and her plan.
The Annotated Mix-Tape, #24
In this latest installment of his Mix Tape series, our writer discovers a new world of digital lore for young music fans and contrasts it with his analogue lessons of yore
American Aristocracy: Gods of Copley Square – Magic 1
A startling triptych illuminates the crossroads of social, racial, and sexual identity in the Copley Square of a century ago, as “The Gods of Copley Square” continues
Ad Infinitum
A radio voice crackles “Hallelujah,” and Booker DeWitt’s violent, surreal steampunk adventures in Columbia begin again in the latest BioShock chapter, BioShock Infinite
Comics: Superman – Secret Identity
An ordinary boy in our real world has a funny name – Clark Kent. Funny, that is, until he starts to develop the exact same superpowers as you-know-who
Three AM, Outside the Pavilion
If comic book artist P. Craig Russell didn’t exist, we’d have to dream him up. Under the covers with a flashlight, Justin Hickey illuminates a pair of his sublime literature adaptations
In the Shadow of a Hero: Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Traumatized by her baby’s kidnapping and murder, disappointed in her marriage to a fallen hero, Anne Morrow Lindbergh found hope in the beautiful, fragile shells she found on the beach. The result was her gentle masterpiece Gifts from the Sea.
Approaching Auschwitz
An incurious and indifferent Jew journeys to Auschwitz to confront the kitsch and the manicured ruins, looking for a sense of connection – and finding it in the most unlikely places
A Devil in the Details
The ideal player for Capcom’s new version of “Devil May Cry” must be a ballerina of death-dealing, striking down an endless array of foes with an endless array of weapons. But how will all of this strike the other-than-ideal player?
The Earl of Gallipoli
The typical image of Winston Churchill comes from the dark days of World War II: a fat, old, bald Prime Minister eloquently defying Hitler’s Germany. But before there was a monument there was a man, as an engaging new biography brings to light.
The Night Train for Naples: Gorky in Italy
The great Russian writer Maxim Gorky’s heart may always have been in Russia, but for years his intermittent stays in Italy stirred his creativity and fired his passion. “In love you discover everything right away,” he wrote – and he loved Italy.
I Groan In Silence
The media just won’t leave old man Voltaire alone! We run a transcript of the latest interview.
From the Archives: The Lion Saves His Pride
Winston Churchill has become such an icon of wartime tenacity that many people tend to forget he had a postwar political career. Barbara Leaming’s 2010 biography examines the last act of a famous man’s career.
Second Glance: A Virgil or Two
He may not have anything new to tell us today, but as Spencer Lenfield demonstrates, Gilbert Highet’s friendly, engaging pedagogy is still rare enough to keep him relevant.
Troppo Sottile
Venice has traded flinty commercial acumen and world-weary merchant princes for an ennui worthy of M. John Harrison’s science fiction; her profession has now become the art of insubstantiality. For centuries authors have tried and failed to capture her. Steve Donoghue surveys the glorious wreckage.
The Flimsiness of Difference
After fictionalizing his experiences in his previous four books, Aleksandar Hemon revisits his memories in a new collection of essays.
How Pictures Comes to Life
Sviatoslav Richter called Pictures at an Exhibition the “best Russian work for piano, amen”; many know it best through Ravel’s lush orchestration, which Richter considered “an abomination.” This beloved piece becomes even more resonant when you know its genesis in Mussorgsky’s friendship with the architect-artist Viktor Hartmann.
“He Might As Well Have Called Me Nancy!” Mark Twain in Italy
After his first visit to Italy, Mark Twain pronounced her “one vast museum of magnificence and misery,” and yet he returned again and again. Luciano Magniafaco chronicles his journeys.
The Road Home: On Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Over the River
New York artist Christo wants to drape 5.9 miles of silvery fabric over a 42 mile stretch of the Arkansas River. The sketches are lovely, but locals and environmentalists are horrified. Who’s in the right?
Van Cliburn, 1934-2013
His repertoire was small, he was no barnstormer, and he gave up full-time concertizing in 1978. But Van Cliburn, who died yesterday at age 78, is to this day the most famous pianist America has …
Judaize This
The belief that Jews are the enemy of civilization is one of the West’s most tenacious and systemic ideas. Professor David Nirenberg’s new history offers a vast, seemingly inexhaustible record of a very old, very useful hatred.
Puce Needle Diggings
When the Paris Review, long regarded as a literary standard-bearer, publishes a volume on the art of the short story, it flushes a flurry of conversations into the open: what is a short story? What constitutes an anthology-worthy example? What’s the audience for this kind of thing? And: can these stories answer such questions?
Flowers in the Pit
“The eye says ‘Here is Anna Karenina,’” wrote Virginia Woolf; “A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls comes before us. But the brain says ‘that is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria.’” Joe Wright’s cinematic adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic avoids the pitfalls of such literalism.
Do You Feel Like a Hero Yet?
Has there ever been a time in American history when the gun-and-violence-obsessed subtext of video games was more problematic? Special Ops: The Line puts you in the place of a grizzled, gun-wielding expert – but it doesn’t necessarily want you to feel good about that.
Epstein’s Kaleidoscope
Joseph Epstein has a cult following as a sharp-tongued critic and essayist. His latest collection showcases his love of words and ideas as well as his caustic wit.
Back, Back, Down the Old Ways of Time: D. H. Lawrence in Italy
Year after year, D. H.Lawrence found love, lust, and gainful employment in Italy – and through the strange alchemy of the place, he also found the inspirations for some of his most enduring works of art.
Tea with the Pushkins in Brussels
Say “Evgeny Onegin” to any educated Russian and you will trigger the first stanza or two of Pushkin’s great novel in verse. Now Russia’s national poet is finally coming into his own in the West as well.
Thinking God Knows What: James Joyce and Trieste
Unsettled and penniless, James Joyce’s exile was initially more imrpovised than cunning. Luciano Mangiafico tells the story of his early years on the continent.
Entred in a Spacious Court
Ben Jonson said that the once wealthy and acclaimed Edmund Spenser died “for want of bread”; a new biography tries to disentangle myth from fact, and to make the case for the great poet’s relevance today
Being Jonathan Harker: recollections of The Dead English
Not every actor gets the plum role of vampire hunter and romantic lead Jonathan Harker. Steve Brachmann reflects on his part in the Dracula-inspired rock musical The Dead English
Second Glance: Jane Collier’s Burn Book
Long before Hairpin and Jezebel, Jane Collier, under the influence of Jonathan Swift, was savagely satirizing women’s ettiquette guides in her work An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. Chris R. Morgan revisits the caustic classic.
How the Higgs Streams in the Firmament
What do Christopher Marlowe and the newly discovered Higgs boson particle have in common? Anthony Lock explores the connection, by way of unified fields.
From the Archives: Is There a Doctor in the House?
Neuroscience? In Elsinore? Lianne Habinek has Hamlet on the brain and goes at the question in book and volume. You may never think about Hamlet, or think about thinking, in the same way again.
Charles Rosen, 1927-2012
Open Letters mourns the loss of Charles Rosen, pianist, scholar, teacher and critic.
A Great and Sustaining Mystery
Anthony Burgess the novelist had dreams of being a composer. He had little success, but along the way he delved deep into the nature and meaning of music.
Rarest Spun Heavenmetal
A Clockwork Orange turned 50 this year and received the gift of an anniversary edition. Justin Hickey looks anew at the novel Anthony Burgess claimed to have knocked off in three weeks, and which made him famous.
Entitled to Extravagance: Some Historical Fictions of Anthony Burgess
Some of Anthony Burgess’ most accomplished inventions roam into the past, to Shakespeare and Marlowe’s England and Jesus’ Judea. How well has his historical fiction stood up across the years?
Traveler at his Desk
Burgess gave himself room to stretch his arms (and facts) in the two volumes of his Confessions. That space to digress, opine, sing songs, is what makes both books so memorable — even indispensable.
Sharing A Cab
Give Anthony Burgess a check and he’d write anything, even a Time-Life picture book. Which doesn’t mean that his 1976 guide to New York is anything less than fascinating.
Fate’s Engine
Commissioned to translate Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Anthony Burgess decided on a few changes to the text. What were they, and what do they teach us about fate?
Too Much Signal
Nate Silver is currently enjoying his status as that unlikeliest of people, the celebrity statistician. Does his bestseller The Signal and the Noise live up to its carefully calculated expectations?
Ou-Boum
“I knew my trip would mean an encounter with Adela Quested”: Victoria Olsen reflects on what she found, and what was lost in translation, when she travelled to India with E. M. Forster on her mind.
The Ghosts of Monmouth County
Bossophilia: The idolization of Bruce Springsteen that comes from midlife nostalgia and a fear of dying. Steve Danziger confronts the phenomenon, and a new biography.
The Power Season
As Americans go to the polls this month to elect a president, some recent biographies examine the lives of five very different men who once held the office.
Never-Neverland
The fairy tale has been through several metamorphoses; the next might result in its extinction. Max Ross reviews Jack Zipes’s cultural history of the genre.
Most Sovereign Master
“Although virtually all subjects were still religious, their humanity was brought to the fore, emphasizing that God, in the form of Jesus Christ, was made man and that He, and the Virgin Mary, and saints, like us, had human features”
Fright Unseen
Once upon a time, the hive-mind of the Internet set to work creating a modern-day bogey man who lurks in plain sight – and so “Slender Man,” the dark mirror image of “Where’s Waldo,” was born
American Aristocracy: Gods of Copley Square – Centerpiece 3
“Perhaps a little drunk might answer” was Phillips Brooks’s idea of how to view Pre-Raphaelite art, several masterpieces of which he commissioned for Trinity Church. “Centerpiece” continues.
CD of the Week – Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Recomposed
You may wonder if Vivaldi’s overexposed Four Seasons needs a new recording, but Max Richter’s inspired recomposition gives the hoary old favorite a shot in the arm
First Person Singular
Can a famously cold and impersonal writer like Paul Auster make a memoir of aging that works against his strengths? And are they strengths after all?
Dignity, Conviction, and Mrs. Stollman’s Checkbook
ESP-Disk’, the cult record label from Bernard Stollman, was known for two things: extraordinary, eclectic recordings and horrendous business practices. A new oral history sheds light on the glorious mess.
A Hope in the Undead
The Walking Dead, the hit TV series adapted from the zombie-apocalypse comics, offers fans a gripping and subversive take on the accidents of survival.
As Dark Locks In: Nightfall
CBC’s landmark scare series is available online at last. Where did such a strange series come from and where has it been all this time?
Leviathan Grimoire
Their brains – their digits – their eyes – their locomotion – their families – their staggeringly long reign over the planet Earth: it’s all here, and much, much more. The greatest dinosaur reference work just got even better.
Change-gamer
Election-weary Americans might wonder why anybody in their right minds would elect to play a video-game presidential contest – but the process can be oddly enlightening.
We Must Worship
The first biography of David Foster Wallace is out and it’s hardly the sort of book he himself would have written — or read. Might this be for the best?
‘Stop, traveler, and piss!’
Lord Castlereagh lives in infamy as the target of the Romantic Poets’ most vicious insults, but a new biography tries to salvage his reputation. Was the statesman a scourge of liberalism or pragmatist of Enlightenment ideals?
The Gods Themselves
How is Hollywood like a clever boy who never tries? In every way imaginable. The story of two Total Recalls is a sad one indeed.
In Praise of the Practitioner
Was General Zhukov the greatest general to order mass executions of his own soldiers? Was he the single most decisive factor in beating Hitler? A new biography opens more questions than it answers.
Gordon’s Alive!
He started an artist on the path to glory, sold a million toys, and inspired a cult classic movie: He’s Flash Gordon, and his earliest Sunday adventures are getting a deluxe reprint series.
The Silence of the Yams
Can plants see and smell and hear? Can they think? Daniel Chamovitz’s “field guide” to the botanical senses poses those provocative questions, but how well does it answer them?
Those Feet
This summer’s London Olympics take us back to 1981′s Chariots of Fire, the 1924 Olympics, and the poetry of William Blake. The connection? All remind us of the fragility of glory and our endless wish to make the past present.
We Could Have Beaten Kennedy…
Lyndon Johnson rained destruction on Vietnam and championed civil rights, amassed a secret fortune and fought for the needy. His paradoxical life continues in the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s epic biography.
A Certain Kind of Loneliness: Thoughts on Bri Hurley’s Making a Scene
“I was seething with unchanneled anger, frustration, and a maddening inability to express myself. In other words, I was perfect for hardcore.” Steve Danziger on a misspent youth at CBGB.
The Adam of Your Labors
Expensive new Batman movies have become a Hollywood ritual, but the character has been thrilling readers – and reflecting a constantly-shifting culture – for seventy years
A Writ of Certiorari
A contentious Supreme Court in the headlines is hardly a new thing – nor is the Court being used for partisan politics and the brinksmanship of history, as Noah Feldman’s Scorpions makes clear
Photographic Fictions
“A few years ago I started sleepwalking, and (while inconvenient) this is kind of exciting to me, because it’s pretty much exactly the mood I’m going for in anything I create.” — a chat with cover artist Adrianne Mathiowetz
Aloof in Ceasar’s Empire
In Soviet Russia, Joseph Brodsky was persecuted by the authorities, but memorized by ordinary people. In the capitalist West, he was feted by the authorities, but ignored by ordinary people. Perhaps it’s just as well he thought reality “nonsense or a nuisance.”
Appearing As Edgar’s Father
Bostonians take pride in the fact that Edgar Allen Poe was born in their city, but there’s a good deal more to the story of that birth than literary tourists ever learn – indeed, there may be more to it than anybody’s ever known.
Summer Reading 2012
As the haze and heat of summer kick into full swing, the folk of Open Letters break out their annual Summer Reading recommendations!
Summer Reading 2012 Continues
Our feature continues, as more Open Letters folk share their annual Summer Reading recommendations!
Tumblr Sphinx
Computers – search engines, interactive databases, digital archives – have the potential to change academic research in ways the previous twenty centuries couldn’t have imagined. But are those changes improvements – or the end of expertise as we know it? Or both?
The Twilight(ing) of the Superhero
Nerdy teenager Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider – and a super-franchise was born! As a new blockbuster Spider-Man movie hits the summer theaters, Justin Hickey takes us on a tour of the character’s colorful – and often tortured – past!
Fort-da Logic
Why do we play video games? And why do we RE-play them? And what the heck has Sigmund Freud got to do with any of it? Gaming guru Phillip Lobo looks at some new iterations of familiar old games and attempts to connect the dots.
What the Duchess of Argyll’s Maid told Dicky Pigg-Wilcott’s Valet at Ascot in ’08!
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was a cherished and beloved fixture of the British royal family for almost a century (and would certainly have stolen the show at her daughter’s Diamond Jubilee, had she lived to see it) – but a new book claims the Queen Mum was just an ordinary human being – and not always a very nice one
The Bureaucrat Who Would be King
President, prime minister, or unnamed Tsar, Vladimir Putin is at once ubiquitous and unknowable; a new book examines the many facets of a new species of autocrat.
From the Archives: I Talk & Laugh & Listen
She oversaw an shepherded the House of Windsor for a century and did more to shape its present character than anyone. Three years ago William Shawcross wrote an official and none-too-gossipy biography.
Endless Forms Most Brutal
As Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” takes movie-goers back to the world of his “Alien” classics, we take a look at the long and lively history of modern cinema’s most famous monsters.
Breaking Up With Blizzard
His teenage years were blissfully misspent playing Diablo II from Blizzard, and now the company has come out with Diablo III – but can the relationship be saved?
American Aristocracy – Beethoven In Granite: The Boston Brahmin Aesthetic
Intertwining through Boston history: the rich, implacable music of Beethoven and the flinty austerity of the Boston Granite style of architecture – trace the connections, as American Aristocracy continues.
Choices at the Event Horizon
In the latest version of the hugely popular video game – as in real life – you are the living culmination of all your past decisions, good and bad.
No Strange Quirk of Fate
This month sees the arrival of the long-awaited $250 million dollar Hollywood movie adaptation of Marvel Comics’ Avengers. Lost in all the hype is the rich history of the comic itself; Justin Hickey explores the convergence of pulp and pixels.
An Interview with John Summers of The Baffler
An interview with The Baffler‘s new Editor-in-Chief, John Summers.
The Baffler Returns
The Baffler, an unapologetically radical journal that always punched above its weight, has had a troubled history. But a long-term publishing contract has rejuvenated it, and shown that an old formula is as relevant as ever.
Into the Breach: Battle Royale and Hunger Games
The box office record-setting movie adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games is the latest incarnation of an unsettling children-as-prey plot that’s been with us in one form or another for a long time – and never more vividly than in Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale
The People’s Prisoner
When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 2010, it was given to an empty chair. Its recipient, Liu Xiaobo, was in prison for advocating human rights in China. Though he is still incarcerated, a collection of essays sheds light on his thought and struggle.
American Aristocracy – Harvard Pulpit: Boston Brahmin Liberalism
To the quintessential virtues the Puritans lent to a fledgling republic – globality, philantropy, and autonomy – the ‘speaking aristocracy’ of the Boston Brahmins added one more: the love of learning
Making the List
Long-time critic John Sutherland’s latest book The Lives of the Novelists takes readers on a biographical tour of 294 creators’ lives. But does it work? Long-time critic Steve Donoghue and novelist John Cotter try to figure that out.
Designing Desire
Steve Jobs, the visionary predator who founded Apple and forged a new way of thinking about technology, wasn’t a particularly nice man (as even his dutiful biographer must occasionally concede) – but was he a genius?
A Man Could Stand Up: On Downton Abbey’s Second Season
Unlike the soap operas with which it is often dismissively aligned, Downton Abbey is defined by change rather than stasis – by its beautifully produced attention to social evolution.
“highly contrived and stylized”
“Spending a summer night alone in Hannibal, watching the Mississippi River, staying in a rundown motel, and getting drunk by yourself … that’s a solid way to spend a day.” — A conversation with poet and cover artist Joshua Ware
Dystopia Now
A simpler, sleeker update of the dystopian 90′s classic Syndicate raises some uncomfortable questions about the here and now.
Bull Sessions: Journalism’s Bloodsport Love Affair
We live in an age of outrage, yet one of our most egregious ‘blood sports’ escapes censure from the press. Since long before Hemingway, writers have been calling bullfighting exotic instead of barbaric — what are they thinking?
‘I am Thy Man’
He fought a world war with France, survived the Black Death, and gave England a real Parliament. Froissart and Chaucer loved him, Shakespeare (almost) wrote about him, and the Victorians disparaged him. He was Edward III, and he has a king-sized new biography from Yale University Press.
Looking for Laura
She’s a shadow, an absence, that haunts the letters, diaries, and novels of her famous half-sister Virginia Woolf. What can we really know about Laura Stephen?
Flexible and Ephemeral
” Paper is a ubiquitous material but it also can be alarmingly elegant. It has religious (holy books, Joss paper) and socio-political (money, contracts), and quotidienne (butcher paper, toilet paper) connotations.” — a conversation with cover artist Megan Heeres
On Reading a Five-Volume Biography of Prince Albert
Maligned as nothing but handsome breeding stock, this German import did more to redefine the role of the monarchy than any subsequent royal, consort or king.
Sentimental Education
Though most people don’t understand musical notation or the theory underlying it, nearly all classical music writing relies on it. Today, the initiate has a better option: YouTube.
Graphomaniacal
“I’ve never been terribly attracted to pretty things in general. Pretty and bland seem synonymous to me, and there’s certainly a lot of that in the art world already.” — a conversation with Bill Amundson
Generalissimo
James Madison was more cautious and purposeful than the temperamental Hamilton or the effusive Jefferson. Indeed, to paraphrase Brookhiser, Hamilton was a rocket, Jefferson was a kite, Madison was a ballast.
Between the Devil and Aunt Edna
His own life was the great tragedy he was never quite able to write. Michael Adams assesses the career of playwright Terence Rattigan.
The Laureate of Everyday
As a young man, the Roman poet Horace ran from battle; when he was older, he turned down a job offer from Augustus Caesar. He refused to write epics, but he gave readers something even better, and it insured his immortality.
“Writing Against Time”: An Interview With Benjamin Markovits
“I made no particular effort to keep the portrait of Byron consistent from one novel to another. I wanted to show him in different lights, from different angles.” Joshua Lustig interviews the author of the esteemed Byron Trilogy.
Survivor Testimony: The Case for Apocalypto
Mel Gibson has made far more headlines for boorish public behavior than for the movies he’s directed, and yet one of those movies — the ambitious, problematic “Apocalypto,” seeks to transcend easy classification.
Lee Miller’s Eye
Lee Miller, known for a hundred years as Man Ray’s muse, comes into her own in a new book and exhibit. What’s she like?
The Personal Was Always the Political
Vivian Gornick’s new biography of Emma Goldman focuses more on the famous anarchist’s love life than her political ideologies–but might those tumultuous relationships offer new insights into her beliefs?
A Heartbeat Away
John Nance Garner famously referred to the vice presidency as being not worth a bucket of warm, er, spit – and yet, during the two terms of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney used that office to wield unprecedented power. The former vice president writes an unapologetic memoir.
There Will Be No More Great Ideas
Robert Musil’s magnum opus The Man Without Qualities was groundbreaking not because it’s unfinished but because it’s unfinishable. A new study attempts to take scope of its deep and mesmerizing pointlessness.
The Restful “I”: Rumi, Psychology, and the Discovery of Love
The 12th-century Sufi poet Rumi is said to have re-created himself as an avatar of love. Chase Nordengren explores the stations on the life cycle that lead to such a radical rebirth.
Real Illusions
“You’ve got to learn the language of art to be able to appreciate it. And then, where you go with it, what you see with it, is only limited to your own imagination.”– A conversation with cover artist John Bonath
The Hero of His Own Life?
It’s easy to love the Dickens we think we know–the man whose warm compassion and boundless imagination gave us Scrooge and Tiny Tim, Pip and Magwitch, Oliver Twist and Nancy. But what about the man behind the novels? Claire Tomalin’s magisterial new biography brings us up close and personal.
Set Sail, Come Home
On the surface, the new RPG Bastion is a fairly straightforward hack-and-slash video game—but a complex narrative back-story reveals some hidden depths.
Last Month
Alan Hollinghurst’s latest; an essay from Douglass Shand-Tucci; Sargent’s El Jaleo reconsidered; António Lobo Antunes’ thrillers; Ben Lerner’s latest; vintage scents; Akilah Oliver’s final volume and far more….
The OLM Quiz: From All Saints Day to Thanksgiving
This month’s quiz has scoured the archives for November-based literary trivia. Do your worst!
American Aristocracy – Letter from Boston: Toward a New History
Boston, so often reproved for living in its memories, may well be poised to lead the future, not in spite of its history but because of it.
On the Scent: A Certain Vintage
Our resident nose racks up facts on the tinctures of yesteryear, many of which still prove possible to capture and some of which are well worth sniffing out
One Encounter: El Jaleo
What good are reproductions and what do we lose in keeping them? Our writer returns to a famous painting after a dozen years and finds more than he’d imagined
Rime Redux
A new graphic novel reworks Coleridge’s classic confrontation between man and nature for our times, taking us on a grand tour of environmental degradation.
Pseudo-Binaristic Wiki-Okatu
The key to storytelling is world-building, and a new book wonders if our new and all-encompassing Digital Era has given mankind world-building tools like it’s never had before. Is it the death of the imagination – or Story 2.0?
Book Review: Animal
A stunning – and miraculously hopeful – update to DK’s legendary guide to animals
Work in Progress
Could you actually be hurting the environment by going green and moving to the suburbs? A new book champions that oft-maligned human invention: the big city.
Walk, Swim, Grumble
Olivia Laing’s digressive natural history of the 42-mile-long River Ouse is filled with philosophical meditations, childhood memories, and of course the ghost of Virginia Woolf. Anne Fernald traces Laing’s meandering footsteps.
Changeable Camelion
Courtier and cleric, adventurer and ascetic, man of faith and man of the world — John Donne was many things in his life, and a sprawling new Companion does its best to assess them all.
Love at First Glans
Nicholson Baker’s provocative new book is an attempt at mainstream literary pornography, but does it suffer from the same performance anxiety as other novelistic efforts to depict sex?
Metaphor Machine, Manufacture and Maintenance
Critics were often baffled by Ray Bradbury in his heyday, and biographers have been equally baffled ever since, but the quest goes on to understand the man who did as much as anybody to give science fiction the shape it has today.
‘Some fights are bigger than others’
Brothers take opposing sides in World War One, in a gripping biography that reveals the history and politics of America’s role in the conflict.
The Golden Touch
A new biography explores the life of the erratic and headstrong ‘forgotten’ Founding Father who bankrolled a revolution and guided a new republic.
The New Old Atheism
Religion is one of those subjects that are too important to be polite about. But can we at least agree to disagree respectfully about the meaning of life?
A Prison Spotlight
Former political radical Susan Rosenberg received the longest sentence ever given for the charge of possessing explosives. Her new memoir revisits her prison experience.
A Raging Appetite
Food writing today requires guts – often quite literally. Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir transcends gross-out theatrics to portray a life in food, from abandonment to something like fulfillment.
A Question, an Answer, and a Death
Cinema lore has it that Jean-Luc Godard read only the first and last three pages of King Lear before making his film adaptation. Lianne Habinek suggests this may have helped him get at the play’s essence.
Sane and Insane
“In fact, many religions use the mandala type form to represent “Controlled Chaos.” Stained glass windows are an example I have a closer relationship to … they intrigued me for hours.”
Bohemia Rundown
Semiotext(e) is famous for theory and provocation. So what happens when its co-founder takes on the art world in the latest installment of their manifesto series? To begin with, she doesn’t write a manifesto…
When the Sewing Needles Dropped
Anne Roiphe was raised in privilege, educated at Smith, and joined in marriage to a successful playwright; her new memoir reveals how painfully constricting that life came to be.
Pros Take On the Cons
A con man, an ambitious office boy, and two Mormons–it sounds like the set-up to a punch line. But is the joke on Broadway? Our theater critic examines the “why” of musicals, the limits of Harry Potter, and the perfidy of Canada.
Second Glance: Astonish Us
Pauline Kael is out of print today and perhaps known best for the enemies she made. But any immersion into her passionate, intelligent writing shows her to have been one of the best movie critics–or critic of any kind–of the past century.
As Crazy Quentin Knows
Frame narratives, rags-to-riches angles, gender-swapping, the wages of grief, and …. love. Yes, we’re talking about a video game, specifically Dragon Age 2.
laying down record player
A conversation with cover artist Julie Schustack about LA, worlds under glass, Frankenstein devices, and building a house just to take it apart.
Last Days of the Rough Rider
Theodore Roosevelt left office younger than any American president before him, and renowned biographer Edmund Morris concludes his TR trilogy with a look at the Colonel’s post-power days.
Strange Silence
Stanley Elkin’s fiction is marked by verbal wizardry and a searing comic vision; does a new biography do justice to his underappreciated artistry?
tumultuous atmospheric spaces
“I learned about ‘letting go’, painting over areas in a piece that I might have loved at first (which often happens in my process, some of my first marks are my most adored), but which no longer worked.” A conversation with Carol Browning and Karen Roehl
Out of Sorts
Books have been with us for thousands of years, and books about books for very nearly that long. The world of books teems with themes, and in the latest massive Oxford Companion, that world receives a bestiary with hopes of being definitive.
A Light on the Ground
The myth of idyllic rural America dies hard, but the scourges of modern society have long since struck the heartland, including the scourge of drug addiction and drug trafficking. A recent book explores the darkness at the edge of town.
Open to Love
“I find that you can get someone to do something outlandish that they would never normally do if you ask them in public as if it’s the most normal request ever.” — a talk with cover artist Rebecca Vaughan
Bodies in Space
Isaac Newton wrote about bodies at rest and bodies in motion – but he never got around to bodies that want to rip you apart with their tentacles and feast on your steaming entrails! A classic video game gets a macabre and highly detailed sequel.
Ijsbjorn
For millions of years, polar bears have ruled the North, inspiring fear and reverence in all the human cultures ringing the Arctic. A new work of natural history studies the great white bear – and wonders if we’re watching the final act.
The Greatness that was Downton
Julian Fellowes’ “Downton Abbey” was shot in a castle, but it may have a nearer relationship to “Mad Men” than “Brideshead Revisited.” Joanna Scutts tracks the evolution of the British costume drama.
Dross of a Passing Dream
A conversation with Open Letters’ new curator, Katie Caron, and an exploration of her upcoming show, “Displaced”
The Light in Their Eyes
Thomas Lawrence was the rising young star painter of the politicians, soldiers, rakes, and mistresses of Regency London, but his work had a life and intelligence that transcended the trendy. A new book looks at a forgotten master.
The Lovable Abject
The tyranny of “supersized” sculpture is dealt a blow by Charles LeDray’s hand-crafted miniatures, on display now at the Whitney Museum
A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance
“I think about how the self might be simply a series of curatorial choices, that it’s fluid, that the poetic ‘voice’ is something to play with rather than solidify.” — a conversation with cover artist Anne Gorrick
Literature is Dead, Long Live Literature
Is the death of literature finally dead? If not, it’s been dealt a healthy blow by Gregory Jusdanis’ Fiction Agonistes, even it art does have to “justify itself in a way not necessary before.”
Debo Speaks!
For most of the 20th century, the vivacious, controversial Mitford sisters captivated the imagination of the Western world. In a long-awaited memoir, Deborah Mitford, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, the last living Mitford sister, tells her story at last.
The Prodigal Brothers
Ever since Cain and Abel, literature has reserved a prominent place for sterling heroes — and the flawed, grasping, and entirely more interesting brothers who live in their shadow.
See Hear!: Erroll Garner and Bill Evans – Two Views of a Trio
Once they had established a repertoire and following, jazz pianists could tour as single artists, adding bassists and drummers from venue to venue. Brad Jones explores the styles of two of the greatest.
Simple Man
No American president in a generation has so polarized the country as George W. Bush, and his new book will almost certainly polarize its readers. Is it defiant agitprop or heartfelt memoir?
W.
For two centuries, he’s been the founding myth of his nation: first in war, first in peace, Washington the paragon. Ron Chernow’s new biography does nothing to tarnish that image — but should it?
The Tao of Steve
For their wit and challenge, Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics have virtually come to symbolize our modern musical theater. A new collection gathers the lyrics to all those maddening, memorable songs, and adds to them with Sondheim’s own comments.
There Are Heroes, and You Aren’t One of Them
A gutted world, a shattered helmet, a battle lost before you ever joined it … in “Halo: Reach,” the franchise delves into the mythology underpinning all heroic narrative, and still manages to deliver some fun.
“An Unerring Eye for the Charmless”
“Ultimately I’m not trying to say much with most of my photography, or my writing either. I am just trying to capture things that interest me, often for very obscure reasons.”
The Platypus
For more than fifty years and more than fifty novels, Louis Auchincloss chronicled the lives of New York’s upper class. His last book is a memoir of his life among that upper class — but is truth stranger than fiction?
Fairytales in Fragments
“I want to escape within the work. Or maybe it’s just that that’s the world of the childhood fairy tales, carrying over into my adult creations?”
George Eliot for Dummies
Free thinker, strong-minded woman, scholar, lover, novelist: George Eliot lived a courageous life that should be known and celebrated. But does Brenda Maddox’s new biography do it justice?
Rhyme and Rylance
David Hirson’s ‘La Bête’ is a sophisticated comedy set in 17th century France and composed entirely of rhyming couplets – not exactly standard Broadway stuff when it premiered twenty years ago. Does the new Matthew Warchus/Mark Rylance revival fare any better today?
Art Beneath the Floorboards
Dostoevsky’s moody, brilliant “Notes from the Underground” was recently given an edgy, provocative theater treatment. Can Russia’s most unfilmable writer be acted on the stage?
See Hear!: Quincy and the Count
A bandleader must be a tireless multitasker who can unite a large group of musicians while satisfying the egos of soloists; two of the greatest are featured here
The Curious Disposition
Some of the greatest works of English literature grapple with the dark, knotted roots of anti-Semitism, and the audience is always complicit. A new book studies the tangle of art and atrocity in writers Chaucer to Marlowe to Shakespeare
In Possession of the Place
Adam Nicolson chronicles his work bringing Sissinghurst castle and its grounds up to date–the delusions of a “hippie-squire” or the worthy restoration of a storied estate?
An Authorless Chorus
“I wanted to emphasize the creation of new space as something, rather than just an absence.” — a conversation with our cover artist Skye Gilkerson
The Annotated Mix-Tape, #7
Black cars, night escapes, spinning vinyl, “Why should I care / Driving’s a gas / it ain’t gonna last…”
On the Scent: Difficult Pleasures
Our regular scentstress extols the difficult: sharp notes, throwbacks, and sweaty musks over easy patchoulis and fruity bores.
Eggs Scrambled Differently: A Look at Wayne Shorter
Saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s performances – improvisational, pointed, unpredictably brilliant – were the stuff of legend, and some pivotal examples were caught on film.
Tales of the Tales of Monkey Island
Like paintings or fine wine, video games have a lifespan – a messy birth, a heyday of renown, and a decline. Retrace the epic life, death – and afterlife? – of Tales from Monkey Island.
“Your Princess is in Another Castle”
In the gaming memoir “Unplugged,” one man grapples with the story of his own addiction to video games.
The Original Wasn’t Better
Amardeep Singh rebuts the oldest of film-goer complaints with a defense of adaptations of classic literature, the more inventive the better
When the Whole Story Isn’t Enough
When Peter Stein adapted Dostoevsky’s The Demons for the stage, he found himself unable to cut a single scene of its 800 pages. The result: a marathon 12-hour production.
Late to the Movies
Movies notoriously fail when they try to depict interiority. So why not just restrict ourselves to books? For a million reasons and more.
Uneasy Witness
Vegetarians choose to be vegetarians and meat-eaters choose to be “normal.” Melanie Joy cuts into the language we use to describe our food and the mindset behind it.
The Thin, Clear, Happy Call
The sunlit aesthetics of the Edwardian era have been given a new look in this essay collection, and the consensus leans decidedly toward the darker meanings belying those lovely surfaces
The Ass Made Proud
As Mark Twain pointed out a century ago, there’s no evidence the man from Stratford ever read a book, much less owned one, and so the number of books alleging and ‘proving’ evidence of his grand fraud grows and grows …
Open Ears on Clark Terry
In his regular column, Brad Jones offers a warm tribute to a Jazz legend who has delighted audiences for over sixty years, from Duke Ellington’s band to the Tonight Show
Looking at Betty Draper
Mad Men’s Betty Draper is spoiled and uppity, but also tragically thwarted by the chauvinism of the era. As Season Four begins, her fate on the show is coming to a head.
Emotional Contagion
A Conversation with Carissa Halston and Randolph Pfaff about his images for their short play “Patsy”
A Certain Perturbation
In Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson explores both the dynamics of faith and the complacency of recent anti-faith screeds. But is her own book something of a fall from grace?
Wedding Plans Are Postponed Due to Patricide
The new Hollywood extravaganza “Prince of Persia” is based on a video game with long history. Fitting, then, that our gamer-expert Phillip A. Lobo should review them both.
Open Ear
In his 94 years, Artie Shaw had eight wives and eight Gold Records–the man and his conquests are on display again in Tom Nolan’s new biography
Brain Vegans
George Romero, master of the zombie movie, returns to theaters with Survival of the Dead, and our resident zombie expert Deirdre Crimmins has a front row seat.
The Trickster of Hyacinth Grove
America’s ever-expanding suburbs have brought us right to the doorstep of the wild – and brought the wild to our doorstep – redefining both worlds in the process.
Cat’s Owls
“Owls are majestic creatures. Their stolid quality is exactly what attracts me to them. I purposefully chose those images based on the ability that this animal has to move with such grace and poise, as if always in perfect control.”
The Mines of Mania
Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, it’s off to game we go as Phillip Lobo delves into the subterranean pleasures of Dwarfortress
Stephanie Diamond’s Social Practice
“Images are entryways. Into memories, into someone’s world, into someone’s story.” And Diamond keeps every one of those images.
You Oughta Know that (Music) is a Battlefield
“Sisters are doin’ it for themselves” … but the Spice Girls? Marisa Meltzer’s “Girl Power” picks some strange hall-of-famers, and gets Megan Kearns shaking her head, “with friends like these …”
PAX Ludorum
Over the last weekend in Boston, thousands of video gamers gathered for PAX East, one of the largest East Coast gatherings of, er, their kind. Intrepid Phillip Lobo was on the scene.
The Napping Anthropologists
They have been with us for fourteen thousand years, and they’re sleeping on the couch right now; a new book takes a comprehensive yet personal look at dogs.
The Man of Steel Revealed?
The most famous fictional creation this side of Tarzan has undergone innumerable changes over the years, and author Tom DeHaven tries to chart them all in his new book on the Man of Steel.
Like Dust, and Memories
In mythology, Alcestis is the model wife, willing to give up her own life for her husband’s. In Katharine Beutner’s lyrical retelling, the truth is more complex.
‘You Talk Too Much…’
Unlike its predecessor, Mass Effect 2 makes being a jerk a rewarding experience–Phillip A. Lobo explores the paradoxes of the Enlightenment, and the complicated morality of being bad.
Twilight of the Giants
The elephants of South Africa and the right whales of the North Atlantic are enormous, complex – and confronted with a growing human population. Two books estimate their chances.
Sunday in the Park with Dramaturgical Heueristics
Giambattista Tiepolo spent a lifetime fulfilling contracts and covering walls with glowing celebrations of light and life. In Tiepolo Pink, Roberto Calasso delves into those bright works.
Katie Caron on Dominium
“It is so easy to create illusions with film, but how can you create an engrossing visual experience with an object? I am obsessed with human nature’s interest in being fooled.”
Dysentery and Other Childhood Memories
If names like “Number Muncher,” “The Oregon Trail,” and of course “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” prompt nostalgic smiles for you, you’ll love this affectionate look at educational video games
Laughin’ Louis
In the first half of the 20th century, Louis Armstrong and Sugar Ray Robinson both rose to greatness that reached across racial divides. Two new books look at the prices they had to pay.
The Why of the Beholder
Can Fantagraphics’ Spectrum series of contemporary fantasy art yield the same sort of enjoyment as a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Steve Donoghue looks into the newest collection.
Adventure.exe
Phillip A. Lobo leaps from the classic 1970s game Zork to Andrew Hussie’s webcomic MS Paint Adventures in his nostalgia-inducing discussion of the allures of interactive fiction computer games
The Long and Winding Road
Jonathan Safran Foer is not the first, but is certainly the most famous, to investigate the ethics of eating animals. Megan Kearns studies both the style and the substance of his argument, with an eye to his less acknowledged allies in vegetarianism
The Wonder of Their Ways
Two books by Jeff Mynott and Colin Tudge explore why it is that birds have such a hold on our hearts. Honoria St. Cyr adds her observations – on the books and on those little marvels around the feeder.
“This Spider — No More!”
In the 1970s, two giants of the Spider-Man comic book, writer Stan Lee and artist John Romita, reunited for a daily newspaper comic strip. Paradise? Ask Khalid Ponte.
The Pleasures of Paranoia
In Assassin’s Creed II, the player plays a player playing a player, all hunting for buried memories and hidden clues to the nature of identity. Philip A. Lobo explains.
An Actor’s Journal – Fuddy Meers
The smell of sawdust, misplaced props, shouts about lights: Steve Brachmann reports on a play going up and the ways in which several real people play their parts.
A Real Island
For a season, Maurice Sendak’s iconic Wild Things have become specifically what Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze want them to be … but what is that? Janet Potter goes out to meet them.
Seger Unsettled
Midwest Rock icon Bob Seger’s former tour manager gives us a behind the scenes look at old time rock & roll; John G. Rodwan, Jr. turns the page.
The Word Made Full-Figured
Counter-culture icon R. Crumb has produced an illustrated version of the Book of Genesis—sincere tribute, or sacrilege? Brad Jones adjudicates.
Confessions of an Armchair Dictator
Tropico 3 tempts its players to become petty, manipulative tyrants; Phillip A. Lobo will permit you (unworthy though you are) of reading his musings on the game.
Fun, with Zombies
Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland straddles the divide between light family fare and flesh-eating mayhem; Deirdre Crimmins is naturally intrigued.
Speaking In Code
Speaking In Code
a film by Amy Grill
sQuare Productions, 2009
What drives, obsesses, and eventually breaks impresario David Day in the new documentary Speaking In Code is that most elusive of quarries: getting something started in Boston.
The something …
Thorns Too
In A Vindication of Love, Christina Nehring has set herself the task of reclaiming romantic love for the Twitter Age. Ingrid Norton rates the results.
Mailer’s Victory
Norman Mailer fought about writers and wrote about fighters, and even after his death, the brawling continues. John G. Rodwan, Jr. enters the ring.
The Truth by Candlelight
Two new books, Life Ascending and Why Evolution Is True, explore the details of Darwin’s great theory, and Ben and Terry Soderquist wonder if the election’s been called before all the votes are in.
The Rookie’s Dream
Does the latest Halo game portend the fracturing of history and the death of narrative, or is it just a really cool game? Phillip A. Lobo explains, naturally.
Prince of a Lost Realm
He ruled the world of Sunday comics with a singing sword and a grin. He was Prince Valiant, and Fantagraphics lets him fight again. Steve Donoghue goes blow-by-blow.
Photography Album and Q&A with Michael George
Open Letters talks shop with cover photographer Michael George
Cosmic Gobbledygook
Did it all start with Bjork, or was she riding an inevitable wave? The world of Icelandic pop is weird, wild, and disarmingly wonderful – let Marc Vincenz be your guide.
‘You Gotta Get the First Beat Right’
If you don’t know The Jazz Book, then as Miles Davis would say, ‘you ain’t never gonna know.’ Brad Jones shows us the groove.
Jazz Festivals and What They Play There
Self-appointed jazz authorities like Wynton Warsalis weigh in on jazz festivals and the musicians who love them, and their listeners. John G. Rodwan, Jr., devoted listener, sorts the noise.
Carmen ex Machina
The blips and whistles of Mario’s soundtrack have evolved into grand strings and horns. Phillip A. Lobo assays how real music has come to video games, and vice versa.
Primordial Sounds of Lost Islands
Music correspondent Marc Vincenz voyages to the end of the world – the windswept Faeroe Islands – and reports back on the entrancing music they make there. And the parties.
Cracking the Music Genome
Your father’s FM radio can close up shop, as far as Steve Brachman’s concerned; the music you want is at your fingertips, and you hear it the way you like it, on your computer.
A Fondness for Turtles
In Following the Water, David C. Carroll has written another paean of praise to the gentle world of pond turtles. But is he writing about a lost world? Tuc McFarland hopes not.
The French Food Connection
Julia Child is all the rage: a new movie (Julie & Julia) and a couple of related books (My Life in France and the gastronomically-inclined Gourmet’s Rhapsody), etc. Sharon Fulton samples the wares.
In a Thing So Small
In Signature in the Cell, Stephen Meyer suggests that science has prematurely evicted a prime mover from cellular biology, and he would like it put back. Ignazio de Vega tests his case.
Simmin’ the Good Life
They live, love, strive, and thrive, but they don’t scrimp, save, hate, or discriminate – is it rapturous capitalism, or virtual virtue? Phillip A. Lobo plays The Sims.
‘The Dog is Going to Die’
He transformed the American musical – and Judy Garland. Now Vincente Minelli has finally got his due – Brad Jones reviews America’s Dark Dreamer by Emanuel Levy.
A First-Class Sport
The noble sport of fisticuffs has done more than a little for cops, kids, and US Presidents. So why is touching the gloves so widely maligned? John G. Rodwan, Jr. steps in the ring to find out.
For Your Consideration
The Academy often forgets Oscar-caliber performances from the first half of the year, but movie maven Sarah Hudson doesn’t! Here are some of her earliest nominations.
Review of Public Enemies
Sarah Hudson reviews Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, scrambled plot and all: “The exquisite production deserves to be seen on a big screen but no one will blame you if you sit this one out.”
‘May Your BlackBerry Rot in Hell’
Brilliant novelist/amateur crank Mark Helprin despairs of your online thievery, and Esther Schell despairs of his new book, Digital Barbarism.
Glory at Half Price
Larry Tye has written a book about the greatest, longest baseball career to date; Brad Jones benches the Babe and tallies up Satchel.
Who the Hell is Lili St. Cyr?
Carl Van Doren called her “the princess who takes off her pants,” but who was Gypsy Rose Lee, really? Kindly let Michael Adams entertain you in looking at two recent biographies.
Marimo Balls, Midnight Sun, and the Water of Life
Quick: What’s Iceland like? Faint idea? Marc Vincenz reassures—your knowledge of Japan will do just fine.
Wishing on a Star (Wars)
“It’s an energy field that connects us all” Obi-wan Kenobi has told us, and Phillip Lobo attests to the truth of it in his review of the latest Star Wars MMO.
That Old Bryn Mawr Accent
Their cinematic pairings are the stuff of movie legend, but do their movies stand the test of time? Sarah Hudson takes in the films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.
Notes from a Crritic
John Goodman, John Glover, and Nathan Lane are currently starring on Broadway in Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece; Andrew Martin’s got an aisle seat, and reports back on a surprisingly sunny Waiting for Godot.
May the Horse Be with Him
Before Arthas was a character in a new novel, he was a character in a video game (World of Warcraft, naturally) – which makes him fair game for our gaming expert, Phillip Lobo.
Grovely! Grovely! Grovely! and all Grovely!
The late Roger Deakin celebrates his beloved trees one last time in Wildwood, and Bryn Haworth gladly finds himself within a dark forest.
The Crowing of Corncrakes
The Decemberists seem benign enough, but their songs are blood-dimmed with rape, drownings, and even cannibalism. The body count rises on their new release The Hazards of Love, but Lianne Habinek also discovers fresh wellsprings of feeling.
Doubling Up on a Pair of Losers
Jerry Siegel and Miguel Cervantes: each created an immortal literary character (Superman and Don Quixote, of course), but what else could they possibly have in common? Taking his cue from Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow, Robert Latona says: more than you think.
Strange New Worlds
J.J. Abrams’ long-awaited Star Trek reboot has hit theaters, and Steve Donoghue looks into whether it carries on a proud legacy, or else overturns it.
Joshua Redman Makes His Move
Joshua Redman’s new album Compass makes some daring allusions to the all-time titans of jazz; John G. Rodwan, Jr. listens to hear how Redman borrows from those pastmasters and how he departs from them.
Trouble Shooting: Video Games into Movies
You’d think any brand of movie that could produce Super Mario Bros. would have no advocates left, but you’d be wrong! Our gaming expert Phillip A. Lobo diagnoses the problem to date and charts a new path for video game movies.
Son Retour?
In 1911, the unthinkable happened: the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. R. A. Scotti tells the story in The Vanished Smile, and Jan van Doop has some ideas of his own.
Grace
Jeff Buckley’s famous father and early death insured him a cult status in the pop culture pantheon. Nivedita Gunturi uncovers the music behind the myths.
Lightning Strikes and Pen Strokes
Veteran comics illustrator David Mazzucchelli takes center stage writing and drawing his first full-length graphic novel, Asterios Polyp, and Sharon Fulton takes a look at the result.
The Last Train for the Coast
The advent of the CD threw the retail music business into a disarray from which it hasn’t recovered. Brad Jones, a veteran of that disarray, reads Steve Knopper’s account of the industry’s Appetite for Self-Destruction.
So This Is What the Dream Is Like
Notorious for its violence and misogyny, or misunderstood for its biting social commentary? Grand Theft Auto IV polarizes; video game docent Phillip A. Lobo attempts to broker a meeting.
Paddy Whacked
Malcolm Gladwell is once again on the bestseller lists, this time for Outliers, about the social science of genius. Peter Coclanis begs to differ with the vox populi.
Book Review: The Pluto Files
In 2006 Pluto was officially taken off the list of planets. Neil deGrasse Tyson relates the ex-planet’s story.
It Is What It Is
Coming out of Bowery rain into downtown New York’s New Museum last Friday, I didn’t expect more than to spend an an hour or so with some installations and some video art, — I’d just …
Worth the Risk
It’s been twenty years since the robbery of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Jan van Doop retraces the art crime of the century in Ulrich Boser’s The Gardner Heist.
No Poorer For It
Culture critics decry video games – including 2K’s BioShock – as mindless, pointless haphazard wastes of time. Phillip A. Lobo offers one fan’s spirited rebuttal.
Big Kid
Thug or genius? Artist or gangster? In his brief, troubled life – and now in the new movie Notorious – The Notorious B.I.G. was an enigma. Andrew Martin sorts myth from legend.
Archimedes and the Plesiosaur
Peter Ackroyd’s Thames: the Biography is a rambling, list-laden account of the much-storied river. Our London correspondent Bryn Haworth tests the waters.
Blue Music
The one jazz album even hardened jazz haters own – Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue – turns fifty this year. John G. Rodwan, Jr. plays out the tracks of its long, strange life.
Who Moved My Charioteer?
In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer tries to anatomize the choosing brain. Lianne Habinek – with an assist from some guy named Plato – anatomizes the anatomizer.
Writhing on the Floor
Harold Pinter, a giant of 20th century literature, is dead, but the legacy of his work lives on. In a letter from London on a recent performance of Pinter’s No Man’s Land, Bryn Haworth takes a look at how the poet and playwright prepared his own memorial.
Cosa Mangia Oggi!
The city that never sleeps also never stops eating, or writing about what it eats. The new food writing collection Gastropolis, edited by Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch, takes the reader on a culinary safari through the history and variety of New York’s food culture. Mary Jane Weedman tucks in and savors the fare.
One More, Please?
It’s been years—too long!—since Martha Argerich has preformed solo. Greg Waldmann eagerly pours thorugh her new DVD and the history of her brilliant career for clues to her reclusiveness and for glimmers of hope.
Ugly on Purpose
Saxophone legend John Coltrane took jazz further from its traditional sound than any artist of his day. Philip Larkin kept traditional rhyme and meter alive in English verse. Richard Palmer’s new study, Such Deliberate Disguises, attempts to make the case for one influencing the other. John G. Rodwan Jr. puts the emphasis on “attempts.”
Carnival of Light
Paul McCartney doesn’t need to worry about his legacy, but he is worried. Perhaps The Beatles Anthology (both book and three (double-disk) CD sets) was the first indication, but Wingspan, a Wings greatest hits compilation …
Frame by Frame
When life and art overlap, the results are always complex – and that’s certainly true of autobiographical graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus. Sharon Fulton takes a look at a tricked-out new reprint of his earliest work, Breakdowns.
World-Famous Feelings
For decades, Oscar Hammerstein transformed the world of musical theater, writing the lyrics for such blockbusters as Showboat, Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music. Michael Adams gives us front row seats for a tour through the master’s many moods.
Semi-Obvious
Before there was Norman Rockwell, there was J.C. Leyendecker, inventor of the advertising brand, star illustrator of The Saturday Evening Post, and clandestine gay man. America loved what Leyendecker drew; Steve Donoghue shows us what they were really seeing.
4 Questions for cover artist Michela Emeson
OL: You’ve lived in both Mexico and Europe. Do you think this has influenced your work away from the American grain?
Michela: Even though I have strong European influences, I am American with a range of work that …
Kaor!
Three new books trek the red rocks of Mars, and although they don’t exactly admit it, they’re in search of one thing: signs of life. Astrid Van Sarisgaard tells us what they discover, or don’t.
Soft by Nature and Quick to Tears
Euripides’ Medea has been explained, performed, and debated for the last 2000 years. Panagiotis Polichronakis looks at Robin Robertson’s new translation and ponders whether it’s fit for scholars, dramaturgs, or the all-elusive common reader.
Set in a Turquoise Sea
“It assaults me, and I adore it!” exclaimed Isabella Stewart Gardner of the legendary city of Venice, and legions of visitors have felt likewise. Venetian writer Tiziano Scarpa writes a love-letter to his spellbinding native city. Professor Hugh Seames has the oar.
The Master Touch: One Encounter with Shakespeare’s Henry VIII
William Shakespeare lived under the Tudors for most of his life, but he only wrote about them once, in his play The History of the Life of King Henry VIII – or did he? In our latest One Encounter, and also the new installment in his “Year with the Tudors,” Steve Donoghue takes a look at that play and the fractious theories attendant.
The Wordiness of the Long-Distance Runner
While confabulating postmodern fictions, Haruki Murakami has also been running – first to stay fit, then at grueling length. Contributing editor Lianne Habinek jogs us through his book on the subject, What I Talk about when I Talk about Running.
Wonderful Water World
All life on Earth is bound to our vast and complex oceans, the subject of The Smithsonian Institute’s new exhibit. Ben Soderquist dives into its companion volume: Ocean: Our Water, Our World.
Terror Planet
It has been a part of every human life since mankind was born – but how much does any of us know about lightning? Terry Soderquist reviews John S. Friedman’s Out of the Blue and tries to fill in the gaps on this most scarifying of natural phenomena.
Pinnacle
Lianne Habinek reviews Katie Hafner’s A Romance on Three Legs and gives up all the gossip on one of the most strange and successful relationships in music history, the ménage a trois among Glenn Gould, a blind piano tuner, and a one-of-a-kind Steinway concert grand.
Book Review: Inside Beethoven’s Quartets
Lewis Lockwood’s Beethoven lectures result in this book about the master’s string quartets. Elizabeth Hardy reviews.
In the Hands of a Master
If you don’t tell a good story then you’ve got no business writing history. According to Jan van Doop – who knows his fakes, phonies, and forgeries – Edward Dolnick’s The Forger’s Spell is the genuine article.
New World Symphony
Tuc Macfarland was forever changed when he first heard whalesong, something he shares in common with the men and women exploring those haunting sounds in David Rothenberg’s Thousand Mile Song.
Life Is Our Cause
Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon sonically reshaped a generation, and Sheila Weller has talked to almost everyone who saw them do it. Laura Tanenbaum, reviewing Girls Like Us, assesses the job Weller does in letting these women roar.
Beautiful Corpses
In The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson assays the experiments he sees as most elegantly defining the wonder of the scientific method. But with their reliance on chemicals, voltages, and vivisections, are these experiments really “beautiful?” Lianne Habinek straps on her lab goggles and takes a look.
Heisenberg was a Human – Pass it On!
Becka Podlertz decries the blinkered arrogance of all animal researchers, just as she celebrates the unique and thought-provoking contribution of Maddalena Bearzi and Craig B. Stanford in their new book, Beautiful Minds: The Parallel Lives of Great Apes and Dolphins
Anything that Moves: The Tudors on Film
More than any other dynasty in history, the Tudors are ready for their close-up. In this installment of his “Year with the Tudors,” Steve Donoghue leads us on a royal progress through film archives to access the heart and stomach of these undying superstars.
Wild World
We know that we can digitize books, but is it possible to translate digital texts back onto paper? Carolyn Grantham explores this and other 21st-century dilemmas in her review of Sarah Boxer’s Ultimate Blogs.
Weirder Than Real: The Films of Michel Gondry
Lianne Habinek forges into the beguiling part-adult, part-childish, part-real, part-dreamlike films of Michel Gondry
One Encounter: Thank You and Goodbye
In February, the great pianist Alfred Brendel gave his final performance in New York City. Greg Waldmann was in Carnegie Hall to see it and in this regular feature he shares the experience.
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