- Books: “Contested Will.”
In this fascinating study, Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, casts skepticism about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works as a “long footnote to the larger story of the way we read now” and traces shifting assumptions about the relation between art and autobiography. Some fifty alternative . . ....
- Books: “Young Romantics.”
Hay examines the “turbulent communal existence” of the English Romantic poets, astutely parsing the intricate circumstances that led to this network’s distinctive creative output; she shows, for instance, that “Frankenstein” emerged not merely out of fireside “conversations about ghosts and galvanism” but . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Classical Music
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METROPOLITAN OPERA
A welcome revival of Verdi’s “Nabucco” features Maria Guleghina and Željko Lučić; Paolo Carignani, the conductor, proves that even early Verdi has plenty of dramatic force. (Nov. 2 at 7:30 and Nov. 5 at . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Classical Music
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OPERA
METROPOLITAN OPERA
A welcome revival of Verdi’s “Nabucco” features Marianne Cornetti and Željko Lučić; Paolo Carignani, the conductor, proves that even early Verdi has plenty of dramatic force. (Nov. 9 at 7:30 and Nov. 12 at . . ....
- Goings on About Town: Classical Music
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METROPOLITAN OPERA
A welcome revival of Verdi’s “Nabucco” features Elisabete Matos, Željko Lučić, and Carlo Colombara in the leading roles; Paolo Carignani, the conductor, proves that even early Verdi has plenty of dramatic force. (Nov. 17 . . ....
- Books: “Driving Home.”
In 1990, Raban left London “on impulse, for casual and disreputable reasons.” He met someone, he tells us, and made for Seattle, the “far-western stronghold of the second chance, second family, second career.” The essays collected here describe, among other things, his attempts to get . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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 . . ....
- 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: Geoff Dyer’s “Zona” review.
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film “Zona” (better known in English as “Stalker”), an outlaw-cum-shaman known as Stalker escorts two men, named Writer and Professor, through an uncanny, Chernobyl-like Zone in order to reach The Room, where innermost wishes are supposedly granted . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Goings on About Town: Classical Music
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METROPOLITAN OPERA
Instead of capitalizing on the considerable strengths of Verdi’s rough-hewn half-masterpiece “Attila”—strong central characters, crowd scenes crackling with patriotic fervor—the Met has opted for a musclebound attempt at what the director, Pierre Audi, calls a . . ....
- “Jack Holmes & His Friend” review.
This story of two young men—one gay, the other straight—who come of age in literary New York in the sixties examines two unrequited passions: Jack’s love for Will, and Will’s literary ambitions, which end abruptly after a review disparages his first novel . . . (Subscription required.)...
- 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: “[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: 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: “Emma Goldman” review.
Gornick’s arresting portrait of the anarchist Emma Goldman (1869-1940), whom J. Edgar Hoover called “the most dangerous woman in America,” is less a political history and more an illumination of “the existential drive behind radical politics.” Goldman, a Russian immigrant who taught herself English . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: Kevin Spacey in Shakespeare’s “Richard III.”
The most underrated of Shakespeare’s many theatrical gifts—poetic, tragic, festive—is his tabloid mentality. Shakespeare knew the value of the sensational: ghosts, gore, and grievous bodily harm were all grist for his melodramatic mill. His plays were always aimed at two audiences: the court and . . . (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: “The Tragedy of Arthur.”
Did Arthur Phillips’s father, a convicted forger who was also named Arthur Phillips, discover, in the private library of an English manor house, a previously unknown early Shakespeare play called “The Tragedy of Arthur”? This is what Arthur Phillips the younger both suggests and frantically denies . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Books: “The Imperfectionists.”
This acute début portrays the world of neurotic journalists—“as touchy as cabaret performers and as stubborn as factory machinists”—at an English-language paper in Rome. Vignettes introduce us to various characters: a naïve Cairo stringer; an obituary writer unable to . . ....
- 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.)...
- David Treuer’s “Rez Life” review.
8220;Indians are famous for a few things—for a kind of off-brand environmentalism, Sitting Bull, and broken English, and most of all for being poor,” Treuer writes in this study of Native American reservations. His upbringing on an Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota makes him adept at . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Joan Acocella: David Gordon’s “Dancing Henry Five.”
David Gordon has always been postmodern dance’s premier minimalist. So you could say he was almost showing off when, in 2004, he took on Shakespeare’s “Henry V”—with its massed armies, its take-charge king, its pretty princess—and made his own . . . (Subscription required.)...
- John Lahr: “All’s Well That Ends Well” and “Measure for Measure”
8220;The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together,” one of the courtiers in “All’s Well That Ends Well” says in a piece of throwaway brilliance that reveals Shakespeare’s argument and his theatrical game. The ever-changing . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Jane Kramer: Two to tango: “Don’t Dress for Dinner.”
The English actor Ben Daniels and the American actress Spencer Kayden were on the Roundabout’s Broadway stage the other day, rehearsing the tango for a French farce called “Don’t Dress for Dinner”—or, as it’s known in Paris, “Pyjamas pour . . . (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: “Lit”
This affecting memoir—the third in a series that includes “The Liar’s Club” and “Cherry”—documents Karr’s alcoholism, the breakdown of her marriage, and the unlikely redemption she finds in the Catholic Church. Chased out of Texas by the memories . . ....
- 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 . . ....
- Books: “What I Don’t Know About Animals” review.
Neither fish nor fowl, Diski’s book is a compassionate, appealing crossbreed of history, philosophy, and memoir—“a kind of travel book but with animals instead of travel,” as she explains in a letter to a sheep farmer, whom she visits during lambing season. She studies . . . (Subscription required.)...
