Displaying articles for: November 2009

Salt to Taste

The chef-owner of the restaurants Hearth and Insieme offers a guide to the building blocks of sophisticated cooking. Read more...

Polar Obsession

Paul Nicklen's photography yields a visionary catalog of life at the ends of the earth. Read more...

Twisted Tree

A South Dakota town caught in the spotlight of a tragedy is revealed through a chorus of American voices that call to mind William Faulkner's Mississipians. Read more...

Hard Rain Falling

Down and out in Portland and San Francisco. Read more...

The Mower

That Andrew Motion's stately work has been slow to arrive on this side of the pond is a sad reminder of how much fine poetry Americans routinely miss... Read more...

The Lieutenant

Americans have often glorified the "First Encounter" of colonizing Europeans with indigenous people. Read more...

The Black Hole War

At the conceptual edge of astrophysics, two titans of the field battle over the shape of the universe. Read more...

Fall

On her fourth record, the popular vocalist and songwriter reveals some sharp edges. Read more...

The Ghosts of Belfast

A former IRA hit man is sent on a final mission -- by the shades of his victims. Read more...

Ford County

A collection of short stories from the celebrated master of the legal thriller offer a take on Faulkner's imagined Mississippi. Read more...

Farber on Film : The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber

Three and a half decades of a pathbreaking critic's work on film from Fuller to Fassbinder. Read more...

Poem Strip

At the end of the '60s, hedonism and terror collided with each other. Read more...

Revolution 1989

Why did the Berlin Wall fall precisely twenty years ago this month? Or is that even the right question? Read more...

Liar

A young woman's predilection for untruth hides an even more unsettling secret. Read more...

The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York

No matter the book or the artwork, Matteo Pericoli always celebrates unique points of view only he could provide, be it the undulating perimeter of Manhattan Island from its rivers; one of his children’s book characters; or a 397-foot, block-plus-long mural featuring architectural highlights from 70 cities from around the globe for John F. Kennedy International Airport. Read more...

The Way of the World

In Francophone countries, Nicolas Bouvier (1929–98) has the reputation of Bruce Chatwin: stylist extraordinaire and philosopher of travel. Read more...

Finch

From the author of City of Saints and Madmen, a detective story set in a shadowy city ruled by fungal invaders. Read more...

Crude World

A harrowing look at the conditions and consequences of the industrialized world's insatiable demand for oil. Read more...

Signal Morning

Will Cullen Hart returns to the sonic playground of Circulatory System, and to the balancing act between experiment and indulgence. Read more...

February 11: Nelson Mandela was released from prison on this day in 1990. The recent anthology Conversations with Myself samples from decades of archived material in an attempt to "give readers access to the Nelson Mandela…

Once held close to the chest and protected by well-understood laws, the valuable information about our lives that we blithely disclose with our every keystroke has the potential…

Books CDs, DVDs to know about now
Alice James

"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.

Midnight in Austenland

The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?

Humble Homes, Simple Shacks...

Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.