- Teju Cole: “Home, Strange Home.”
In November, 1975, when I was five months old, my mother took me home from America to Nigeria. My father completed his M.B.A. and joined us a few months later. Growing up in Lagos, I began to invent memories of my place of birth, the small college town of Kalamazoo . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Touch.”
Like the messianic Walt Whitman (“I make holy whatever I touch”), Henri Cole has spent his career tallying ecstatic and multifarious encounters with physical reality. Such encounters permeate this sumptuous new collection of poems, in which Cole is to be found addressing a pig, a strand of seaweed . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Lauren Collins: The history of men’s underwear.
Not long ago, Shaun Cole, a course director at the London College of Fashion, delivered a lecture to about forty students in a darkened auditorium. The lecture was on the topic of men’s underwear, which—as Cole points out in his recent book, “The Story of . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Invisible Bridge.”
Andras Lévi arrives in Paris from Budapest in the fall of 1937 to study architecture at the École Spéciale without knowing a word of French. Within weeks, however, he is constructing a model of the Gare d’Orsay at school and building sets at . . ....
- Hilton Als: Cole Porter rides the waves.
In the difficult and fiscally depressed years that linked the momentous Stonewall riots, of 1969, to the Daily News’s notorious 1975 headline (misquoting the President at the time), “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD,” Manhattan’s culture and fashion industries underwent a decisive change. Turning away . . . (Subscription required.)...
- James Wood: Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child” review.
Most of the prose writers acclaimed for “writing beautifully” do no such thing; such praise is issued comprehensively, like the rain on the just and the unjust. Mostly, what’s admired as beautiful is ordinary; or sometimes it’s too obviously beautiful, feebly fine—what . . ....
- James Wood: Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams.”
8220;How much land does a man need?” Tolstoy asked, in his well-known fable of that name. His answer: Just enough to be buried in. The protagonist of Denis Johnson’s novella “Train Dreams” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $18) needs just enough to be . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Above and Beyond
goatTitle-->NATIONAL POETRY MONTH
The Academy of American Poets’ celebration gets under way this year on April 1 at 7, with readings by Henri Cole, Kimiko Hahn, and Ed Sanders. (McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince St.) Other highlights include the Academy’s annual benefit, “Poetry & the . . ....
- Kayleen Schaefer: Drybar salon, Mitchell Rossi, and Alli Webb.
8220;Don’t take this the wrong way,” Mitchell Rossi, a stylist at Drybar, a new hair salon near Union Square, said to Laurie Cole one recent evening, as he swivelled her toward the mirror to show her his handiwork, “but you look like an un-Botoxed . . . (Subscription required.)...
- James Wood: Dreams and responsibilities in Rana Dasgupta’s “Solo.”
Rana Dasgupta’s novel “Solo” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $25) brings to mind Mark Twain’s quip about how the older he got, the more clearly he remembered things that had never happened. Its protagonist is a blind Bulgarian man named Ulrich, who is nearly a . . . (Subscription required.)...
- James Wood: Dreams and responsibilities in Rana Dasgupta’s “Solo.”
Rana Dasgupta’s novel “Solo” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $25) brings to mind Mark Twain’s quip about how the older he got, the more clearly he remembered things that had never happened. Its protagonist is a blind Bulgarian man named Ulrich, who is nearly a . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Sam Lipsyte: “Deniers.”
8220;Trauma this, atrocity that, people ought to keep their traps shut,” Mandy’s father said. American traps tended to hang open. Pure crap poured out. What he and the others had gone through shouldn’t have a name, he told her friend Tovah, all those years . . ....
- Books: “James Madison.”
One of only two delegates to attend every session of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Madison transcribed the deliberations. He decided to publish this “most exact account” posthumously, reasoning that “the distance of time like that of space” lends to everything an “attractive” lustre. In . . . (Subscription required.)...
- James Wood: Hilary Mantel’s “Bring Up the Bodies” and Thomas Cromwell.
Anthony Powell, in wise-facetious mood, once quoted an English publisher on how to write “a good Jewish novel”: write a good novel, then change all the names to Jewish ones. The joke came to mind while I was reading Hilary Mantel’s “Bring Up the . . ....
- Books: “Old Border Road.”
This début novel, set in the open spaces of the Southwest in an indeterminate modern age, traces the disappointments and betrayals of a young woman’s first year of marriage. Katherine’s feckless mother and absent father leave her ill-equipped to refuse a quick union . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Verdi’s Shakespeare” review.
In the essays collected here, Wills examines how Verdi—who, though he did not read English, “adored Shakespeare”—composed and staged “Macbeth,” “Otello,” and “Falstaff,” all “solid masterpieces,” and the latter two “arguably the greatest things he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “William Golding.”
Carey’s thorough and illuminating biography, the first of Golding, also serves as a crucial introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s output. Golding’s novels, which include “The Inheritors,” “Pincher Martin,” and “Darkness Visible,” have always stood in the . . ....
- Richard Brody: Jia Zhangke’s “24 City” and the Dardennes’s “Lorna’s Silence.”
paragraph class="noindent">There’s a crisis of naturalism in the contemporary cinema, resulting from the presumptively objective, quasi-documentary style with which politically engaged filmmakers have been getting their messages out. The Chinese director Jia Zhangke—as seen in his latest film, “24 City” (Cinema . . ....
- Books: Candia McWilliam’s “What to Look For in Winter” review.
The Scottish novelist Candia McWilliam met with so many midlife reversals—divorce, severe alcoholism, and, finally, a rare condition called blepharospasm that left her unable to open her eyes—that her friends all but demanded she write a memoir. But, rather than contribute to the welter of “ . . . (Subscription required.)...
- James Wood: Ben Lerner’s “Leaving the Atocha Station”
In his autobiography, “My Past and Thoughts,” the nineteenth-century Russian writer Alexander Herzen discussed the moral stagnation that followed the crisis of December, 1825, when an optimistic rebellion, led by liberal aristocrats and Army officers in St. Petersburg, was easily crushed by Nicholas I, the new tsar . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Ticking Is the Bomb.”
Flynn’s memoir, his second after “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” covers impending fatherhood, his mother’s suicide, revelations of torture, and his father’s alcoholism and dementia. The structure—a few pages on each subject—gives the book a jittery energy . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “The Future,” “Another Earth,” and “Cowboys & Aliens.”
To call a movie “The Future” is, if you think about it, inspired. In any city where the film is playing, people will say to one another, “Have you seen ‘The Future’? ” If the title is doomed to cause misunderstanding, that is part of . . ....
- Mike Peed: “Edi & the Wolf,” in the East Village.
paragraph class="noindent">At this new Austrian tavern, wedged into an increasingly companionable stretch of Alphabet City, “Edi” is pronounced “Eddie” and “the Wolf” does not refer to Harvey Keitel’s character in “Pulp Fiction.” These are the nicknames of the . . ....
- Cornelius Eady: “Emmett Till’s Glass-Top Casket.”
By the time they cracked me open again, topside, abandoned in a toolshed, I had become another kind of nest. Not many people connect possums with Chicago,
but this is where the city ends, after all, and I float still, after the footfalls fade and the roots bloom around us . . ....
- Emily Nussbaum: “Archer,” “Eastbound & Down” reviews.
8220;Archer” is a fleet, filthy sitcom, an animated half hour about a spy who is convinced that he’s the center of the universe. Created by Adam Reed, the series, on FX, blends James Bond plots and “Mad Men” looks, then marbles in the surreal . . ....
- Bill Manhire: “My Childhood in Ireland”
I never climbed the hill
or strolled to the end of the pier
to see what the walkers in rain
might be finding out there.
Nor did the book fall open
where Maeve had secretly signed it.
In fact, it never fell open.
Not that I minded: the world
streamed . . ....
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Three Stages of Amazement.”
Edgarian’s second novel follows an idealistic couple who want their marriage to be “a flexible, romantic sort of agreement” but find that it has become “a mousetrap.” Lena used to be a “nail-the-bastards” radio producer; now she cares for two . . . (Subscription required.)...
