Books
No one writes letters anymore, but I still like reading them — especially when both sides of a correspondence are collected between two covers. No narrative, no argument — just the mercurial yet implicit unity of a relationship. Still, I’m not sure why I picked up this book.
Books
Aptly titled, Forbidden City is Gail Mazur’s seventh book of poetry. Before getting the book — which she sent me — I knew that Gail had written the poems in the years after her husband, Michael Mazur (1935–2009), had died of congestive heart failure.
Books
The Playground Project explores an era of artistic play.
Books
Bloom’s papers mine the histories of gift rituals, interrogate the meaning objects are endowed with as gifts, and place value on an object that is meant to be used once and then discarded.
Books
When I left off last week I was halfway through this quartet of low-life-in-the-midst-of-high-life novels, dissatisfied with the series’ prelude, Never Mind, but encouraged by the relative superiority of book two, Bad News.
Books
In the 16th century, Pierre Belon published one of the earliest scientific depictions of a dolphin: a woodcut with finely hatched skin and pointed teeth.
Books
To begin reading a contemporary novel isn’t easy, if you’re not in the habit.
Books
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.
Books
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.
Books
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.
Books
I keep wondering whether it’s really possible to write at length and in depth about this kind of music.
Books
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.