Reader's Diary

Displaying articles for: January 2009

January 26, 2009

Reader's Diary: The Culture Watch

By Brooke Allen

From gallery to museum, music history to musical performance. Plus, striking new fiction. Read more...

About the Columnist
Brooke Allen is the author of Twentieth-Century Attitudes; Artistic License; and Moral Minority. She is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New Criterion, The New Leader, The Hudson Review, and The Nation, among others. She was named a finalist for the 2007 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.
Daybook

June 18: George Orwell's "As One Non-Combatant to Another" was published on this day in 1943. Orwell's poem arguing against pacifism quotes from Churchill's "finest hour" speech, delivered to Parliament and the nation on this day in…

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Previously in Daybook
In the Margin

Very few debut novels exhibit the charm, assurance, emotional depth and bravura fabulation which the lucky reader will discover in Helene Wecker's

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Earlier Posts
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The Long List
Books, CDs, DVDs to know about now
The New York Review Abroad

This new collection of some of the best of overseas reportage includes articles from Joan Didion, Tim Judah and Susan Sontag, with topics ranging from impromptu theater in conflict-ridden Sarajevo to a gravediggers’ strike in Liverpool. 

Hour of the Red God

In this searing African crime novel, former Maasai warrior Detective Mollel must defy a corrupt Nairobi government to solve the case of a murdered tribe woman.

The Wonder Bread Summer

This Tarantino-esque thriller finds shop girl Allie and a Wonder Bread bag full of cocaine on the run from a vindictive hit man - after she discovers her dress shop is a front for a narcotics ring.