- Books: “[sic]” review.
Intended as a “riposte to the literature of disease”—inspirational stories in which illness presents an opportunity to discover how beautiful life actually is—Cody’s memoir is a manic and often dispiriting account of a young Manhattan composer’s struggle with cancer. Drawn . . . (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: “Believing Is Seeing” review.
Morris frames these conversational essays as “a collection of mystery stories,” casting himself as a detective charged with investigating the contested reality behind a photograph or set of photographs. He is drawn to documentary images—for example, of the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the Depression . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Enchanter.”
Zanganeh writes a love letter to literature and to Vladimir Nabokov, a writer who has charmed her with his “demonic artistry of words” and with the “joyousness of pure knowledge.” Zanganeh, once a reluctant reader, picks up “Ada, or Ardor” and quickly discovers that . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Noon” review.
In this collection of four linked stories, Rehan Tabassum grows up in Delhi with his strong-willed single mother and sets out to “enjoy his strange patrimony”—his father being a Pakistani media tycoon with an array of in-fighting heirs and informers. Tabassum’s sprawling . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Joan Acocella: “Smut,” “Lightning Rods,” “House of Holes: A Book of Raunch” reviews.
We are often told that, in art, sex must keep a few veils on in order to be sexy. That’s certainly not true in painting—there are many nudes that make the heart beat faster—but in literature the rule generally does apply. One of the . . ....
- Anthony Lane: “Robin Hood.”
What do you get if you mix “Gladiator,” “The Return of Martin Guerre,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Elizabeth,” “Troy,” “The Seventh Seal,” and a hundred buckets of mud? The answer is “Robin Hood”—the latest version . . ....
- Books: “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.”
Abandoned by his wife and rebuffed by his estranged father, a middle-aged salesman named Maxwell Sim—“like a SIM card”—finds he has “lost all appetite” for “human contact.” Leaving behind seventy Facebook friends and the fake e-mail address he . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: Victor Cha’s “The Impossible State” review.
8220;Industrialized,” “urbanized,” and “high tech” are not words one typically associates with North Korea. Yet, in the wake of the Second World War, as China and the U.S.S.R. vied for influence in the Korean peninsula, it was just that. Since then, political paranoia, economic . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Art
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MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM
Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“Velázquez Rediscovered.” Through Feb. 7. | “Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156-1868.” Through Jan. 10. | “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915.” Through Jan. 24. | “ . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Art
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MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM
Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“The Drawings of Bronzino.” Opens Jan. 20. | “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915.” Through Jan. 24. | “Velázquez Rediscovered.” Through Feb. 7. | “Sounding the Pacific: Musical Instruments . . ....
- Books: “Feeding on Dreams” review.
This latest memoir by the Chilean-American author and former Allende adviser resumes the tale of his countless “dislocations” since fleeing Chile, in 1973. Dorfman shuttles among three continents and two languages, adrift in “an eternal victimhood of regret.” The resulting “wrath” may help . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Art
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MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM
Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915.” Through Jan. 24. | “Velázquez Rediscovered.” Through Feb. 7. | “Sounding the Pacific: Musical Instruments of Oceania.” Through Sept. 6. | “Peaceful Conquerors . . ....
- Books: Francis Spufford’s “Red Plenty,” review.
The first sign that this is not an orthodox history is the “cast” list up front, in which real people mingle with fictional ones. This hybrid approach, Spufford argues, befits the “fairytale” nature of his subject: the Soviet Union’s attempt—via a centralized . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Blueprints for Building Better Girls” review.
Schappell’s second collection is framed by two stories about a woman named Heather. She first appears as a high-school student, “a good girl with a bad reputation,” who dreams of becoming a marine biologist. In the later story, she tries to discourage her teen-age . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Outlaw Album” review.
In this collection’s twelve stories, Woodrell expands upon the unremittingly bleak portrait of Ozark life drawn in his novel “Winter’s Bone” and in the acclaimed film based on it. In one, a young woman tends to a rapist who was brain-damaged when she . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “Curfewed Night.”
Peer’s memoir of Kashmir chronicles a “fairy-tale childhood of the eighties”—samovars of kahwa tea drunk in paddy fields beneath the Himalayas—that gives way to “the horror of the nineties”: India’s rigging of the 1987 state elections and . . ....
- Books: “No Such Thing as Silence.”
In this concise survey, Gann, a composer and music critic, examines John Cage’s famously noteless composition “4′33″” from origins to afterlife. He lucidly catalogues the “specifically American mix” of influences—Duchamp, Zen, Erik Satie, Thoreau, Robert Rauschenberg—that fed . . ....
- Adam Gopnik: “The Lord of the Rings,” “Twilight,” and young-adult fantasy books.
At Oxford in the nineteen-forties, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was generally considered the most boring lecturer around, teaching the most boring subject known to man, Anglo-Saxon philology and literature, in the most boring way imaginable. “Incoherent and often inaudible” was Kingsley Amis’s verdict . . ....
- Books: “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?” review.
This lively survey asks “what translation has done in the past and does today,” and “whether it is one thing or many.” In thirty-two wide-ranging chapters, Bellos variously corrects bits of misguided folk wisdom (Eskimo, it turns out, does not have a hundred words . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Beautiful and the Damned” review.
Deb crisscrossed the Indian subcontinent for several years, mirroring the migrations of the restless subjects of this sensitive profile of a nation—from the flashy entrepreneurs who represent “the new India” to the farmers and factory drones who toil just as desperately as ever. Deb’s . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “O.”
8220;You ever wonder why stories like yours get buzz?” Cal Regan, a handsome young campaign manager for O, asks Maddy Cohan, a beautiful young reporter. The answer, he volunteers, is that “you imprinted a stupid Hollywood psychodrama on the race when there are no facts to support . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “O.”
8220;You ever wonder why stories like yours get buzz?” Cal Regan, a handsome young campaign manager for O, asks Maddy Cohan, a beautiful young reporter. The answer, he volunteers, is that “you imprinted a stupid Hollywood psychodrama on the race when there are no facts to support . . . (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.)...
- 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.)...
- Anthony Lane: “Higher Ground” and “One Day.”
Speaking as someone chained to the past—or to an imaginary version, if the real one proves unavailable—I tend to inquire, when grading the current fortunes of an actress, not “How good are her movies?” but “How bright would the gleam have been in . . ....
- Books: “The Sabbath World.”
When Edmund Wilson set out on his various intellectual spelunking adventures, he would say that he was “working up” Hungarian poetry or Russian revolutionaries, the literature of the Civil War or Iroquois culture. Judith Shulevitz, a deeply intelligent journalist in her forties dissatisfied with the frenzied quality of . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Art
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MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM
Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“Vermeer’s Masterpiece ‘The Milkmaid.’” Through Nov. 29. | “Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans.’” Through Jan. 3. | “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915.” . . ....
