Italy
Notes From Italy: Dawn in the Suburra
June 3, 2026In early June, the best time in Rome is dawn. A little after first light the...
Fiction Reviews
Who Didn’t Do It?
June 2, 2026The “golden age” of detective fiction, which began roughly with Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles,...
Fiction Reviews
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
June 2, 2026The relationship between Peter and his parents is given more space, but this could also have...
Fiction Reviews
So Many Ways To Begin by Jon McGregor
June 2, 2026David and Eleanor’s story is an unremarkable one. But their ordinary disappointments and frustrations are precisely...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins by Rupert Everett
June 2, 2026The universe appears to have cheated Rupert Everett. By rights, he belongs to the Edwardian age,...
Crime Fiction
The Fighter by Craig Davidson
June 1, 2026James Ellroy, Cormac McCarthy and William T. Vollmann have some new company hanging out on their...
Travel
Notes From Italy: Sunday With the CAI
June 1, 2026This is not Labrador. We are fifty miles northeast of Rome and a mile above sea...
Non-Fiction Reviews
The Yorkists by Anne Crawford
June 1, 2026To be sure, the fifteenth century was one of the most politically unstable periods in English...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Look Homeward America by Bill Kauffman
June 1, 2026He is not much impressed with modernity, rejecting with certitude McDonald’s transfatty fries, the inter-state highway...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Friendship is the First Step to Peace: A Review of Picture Books that Highlight Our Getting Along
June 1, 2026Sometimes, feeling different is the root of feeling lonely. Ezra Jack Keats’ whimsical Regards To The...
Non-Fiction Reviews
The Perfect Summer by Juliet Nicolson
May 31, 2026...essentially, the book remains a story of British upper classes and the author has seemingly trawled...
History
A Talk With Cullen Murphy, Author of Are We Rome?
May 31, 2026"That said, the thinking that lay behind the invasion of Iraq—the notion that we could transform...
Fiction Reviews
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
May 30, 2026This relationship — Mari, plain and studious; Eri, "gorgeous" and shallow — is our first intimation...
Fiction Reviews
Book of Hours
May 30, 2026Clocks, with their symbolic freight of time and plot, can serve as weapons with which the...
Fiction Reviews
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
May 29, 2026Repression, fear and even loathing run through her mind as she braces herself for what is...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Sophie Osborn on Saving the California Condor
May 29, 2026"I think hunters need to start demanding more research into the human health impacts of hunting...
Non-Fiction Reviews
T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting Discusses Hip Hop’s Attitude Toward Women
May 29, 2026"The title was inspired by Snoop Dogg. It captures the ethos of the new gender politics...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Once Upon A Time
May 29, 2026Suppose one’s made a viable, literate translation that succeeds in conveying the narrative or expository sense...
Fiction Reviews
An Interview With Novelist Nicole Mones
May 29, 2026"I know food is hot right now – we have the Food Network – but believe...
Non-Fiction Reviews
An Interview With “Pistol Pete” Maravich Biographer Mark Kriegel
May 29, 2026"One of the components of genius, I would argue, is an unnaturally high tolerance for practice....
Art & Design
Paul Bril’s Restored Paintings in the San Silvestro Chapel at Rome’s Sancta Sanctorum
August 10, 2026Born in Antwerp in 1554, Bril was working in Italy at the end of the century,...
Biography
In My Father’s Shadow by Chris Welles Feder
August 5, 2026Orson had become so famous for his villainous role as Harry Lime in The Third Man...
Art
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
August 7, 2026The people of that ancient nation had been decimated in the opening genocide of modern times,...
Art
Francis Alÿs: Fabiola at the National Portrait Gallery, London
July 27, 2026Perhaps what fascinated him about these portraits was that they show this urge to create and...
Art
Tim Burton at MoMA
August 11, 2026Predictably, Tim Burton is already a wildly popular show. As throngs of families, film buffs and...
Movies
Movie Review: Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire
August 8, 2026Comedian Mo’Nique, best known for urban comedies like Phat Girlz and Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins, gives...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame
August 3, 2026Never perhaps has there been such a masterful account of the man’s failures—and successes—in this country’s...
Art & Design
The Barnes Foundation: Beauty Surrounded by Controversy
August 1, 2026And what a treasure trove! By the time of his death in 1951, Barnes had purchased...
Fiction Reviews
Stitches: A Memoir by David Small
July 31, 2026But, as we see in the terrifying drawings of his radiologist father giving him neck adjustments—“kkrraackk,”...
Movies
Movie Review: The Lovely Bones
August 16, 2026The novel opens with a striking, abrupt proclamation: “My name is Salmon, like the fish; first...
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