Books
Reader's Diary: Edward St. Aubyn's ‘The Patrick Melrose Novels’
To begin reading a contemporary novel isn’t easy, if you’re not in the habit.
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A Photographic Survey of Africa's Enduring Masquerade Traditions
From initiation rites to harvest festivals, many traditional African rituals require participants to don masks and elaborate costumes that transform their wearers into spirits, beasts, or ancestral beings.
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Martin Parr Photographs Real, Sad Food
Limp slices of bread smeared with butter, a single sausage lounging in orange soup, a presentation of pork knuckles resembling discarded brains — this is far from the stuff you'd find on the menu of your local farm-to-table eatery filled with upcycled furniture.
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Scarred Rejects from the Farm Security Administration's Great Depression Photos
Spend some time browsing the 145,000 negatives at the Library of Congress from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and an odd pattern will emerge.
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Reader's Diary: Franklin Bruno's 'Armed Forces’
I keep wondering whether it’s really possible to write at length and in depth about this kind of music.
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Beguiling Simplicity: The Poetry of Robert Lax
Lifelong friend of Trappist Monk Thomas Merton and abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, Robert Lax wrote spare poems that, in their beguiling simplicity, provoke anxieties about how and why we read.
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Antithetical Poetics: Recent Books by Joseph Donahue
Among contemporary American poets, Joseph Donahue is an underrecognized master. For years, he has been accumulating a prodigious body of work in which a searching vision and a refinement of craftsmanship combine.
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After 25 Years, an Influential Epistolary Novel Series Mails Its Last Letter
Griffin Moss, a lonely painter in London, and his mysterious muse Sabine Strohem were first introduced in the 1991 best-seller Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence, an epistolary novel composed of extensively illustrated postcards and removable handwritten letters by author and artist
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The 9th-Century Islamic "Instrument Which Plays by Itself"
In the 9th century, the Banū Mūsā brothers in Baghdad designed a mechanical, hydraulic organ that was made to play endlessly by itself.
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Mining the Unknown in Julian Barnes and John Berger's Essays on Art
Underlying Julian Barnes's and John Berger's respective new collections on art, Keeping an Eye Open and Portraits, is the notion that we're still figuring out how to engage with and portray the past.
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A Portrait of Rochester, New York, in 1,000 Photographs
A phonebook is a collection of data that encapsulates a specific place at a specific time. It’s a complete historical record, a city in book form. Rochester 585/716 wonders whether a photo book can be the same.
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The Pitfalls and Possibilities of Ta-Nehisi Coates's 'Black Panther'
When it was announced last fall that Ta-Nehisi Coates would write an ongoing Black Panther series at Marvel, with art by Brian Stelfreeze, people beyond the confines of the comics industry got excited.