‘Invitations to Dig Deeper’
Nineteen thirty-six was a momentous year for George Orwell, then aged thirty-two. On January 31 he went north to Lancashire and Yorkshire to collect material for...
A Language of Geometric Forms
Sophie Taeuber-Arp was given a small show at the Museum of Modern Art forty years ago, but the large exhibition there now is the first opportunity...
A Kinetic Endlessness
Silken flounces flying up, his golden, hers blue, up he kicks, out she twists, his right hand takes her left and the naked man slips through:...
Strangers in a Strange Land
Over the years, glimpses into the inner sanctums of the Hasidic world have come along via literary or scholarly works, a few television miniseries, and, once...
The Waste Land
A few years ago I attended an open house at the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, southwest of Chicago. It was a lovely Saturday morning, and I...
Scenes of the Crime
John Banville’s first novel, Nightspawn, published more than fifty years ago, is set in Greece, which was then ruled by a military junta. The Irish protagonist,...
White Peonies
This is how it happens, one morningThe ground is only the ground, & thenGreen shoots through the rich brown loam.I learned the word loam when I...
Thinking Without Banisters
The proliferating crises of the American republic have prompted a revival of interest in the life and work of Hannah Arendt. Her book The Origins of...
LEGENDBORN Series is Being Adapted Into a TV Show
Legendborn by Tracy Deonn is a YA fantasy novel, the first in a trilogy, that came out in 2020. It spent nine weeks on the New...
The Only Way to Go
To the Editors: Giles Harvey writes that Shirley Hazzard “loved to embroider her sumptuous prose with stock phrases and received ideas” [“‘All One’s Capacities,’” NYR, October...
